Octane Render has been one of the more exciting new GPU-based rendering engines out there and the company has done a string of announcements lately with SDK-based plugins for specific applications. The latest is a new OctaneRender for ArchiCAD plugin.
The new ArchiCAD OctaneRender plugin embeds the OctaneRender GPU-based rendering engine directly into Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD. This greatly speeds up workflows as users no longer need to export out directly to a standalone version of OctaneRender for utilizing this well regarded new rendering engine.
Sadly, it appears the software development kit (SDK) that enables programmers to develop plugins for their own applications is currently limited to working with Windows. So there isn’t a Mac version for those ArchiCAD users on the Mac.
New Octane Render by Refractive Software - Mac, Windows and Linux CUDA -based Multi-GPU Ray Tracer.
Octane Render 1.1
OctaneRender was in beta for a long time. Architosh initially covered the news of this product back in April of 2010. And version 1.0 was released in November of 2012 (last year). So what’s in Octane Render 1.1? The standalone product, we should point out, runs on Mac OS X as well as Windows.
Here are some key features of OctaneRender:
- un-biased ray-tracing engine that is fully GPU-based (speeds of up to and beyond 10x over CPU)
- physically based light
- multi-GPU support
- NVIDIA CUDA based, exclusively (no support for OpenCL quite yet, hence no ATI/AMD cards)
- Images textures take over 40 different formats
- Realtime 3D anaglyphic stereo rendering
- realtime interactive editing and rendering of scenes
- Import in Wavefront OBJ file format, supports geometry update post setup
- Windows, Linux and Mac OS X 10.5+
New in version 1.1
- Post processing
- New daylight system
- Importance sampling for HDRI environment textures
- Shadow catcher
- orthographic camera
- white balance
OctaneRender currently has fully integrated plugins for Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Smith Micro’s Poser (the latter two in beta). And there are now free community developed exporter plugins for Max, Maya, Softimage, Blender, CINEMA 4D, SketchUp and modo.
OctaneRender Standalone Edition v1. license is 199 euro. Licenses are fully cross-platform. Click here to learn more.