OTOY announces availability of OctaneRender 2—GPU based real-time rendering solution powers forward

Cloud graphics pioneer, OTOY, Inc., this week has announced the availability of OctaneRender™ 2.0, the latest iteration of the company’s sophisticated real-time rendering software. This latest iteration boasts more than a dozen new features that will help artists, designers, and engineers to create the most realistic renders possible in less time than ever before.

Hollyood Visual Effects for the Masses

Praised by some of Hollywood’s top visual effects (VFX) artists and directors for its quality, speed and versatility, OctaneRender has been used in the development of a number of blockbuster films, including the recently released Godzilla, and downloaded hundreds of thousands of times around the world.

READ MORE: Why OTOY will change our 3D world: A conversation with Jules Urbach

This most recent release combines unmatched speed, new advanced effects and an efficient workflow to enable users’ best work.

“Our goal at OTOY is to unlock people’s full creative potential, to empower people to do their best work, in less time, in any application, on any device,” said Jules Urbach, Founder and CEO, OTOY. “OctaneRender 2 is a huge step toward that goal. It’s the culmination of an incredible effort to respond to the passionate artists, designers, and engineers who use the product every day, to improve their creative output while making their workflows faster and easier. Everything we’ve put into this version is based on community feedback. We’re excited to put it in people’s hands today and can’t wait to see the incredible creations that come from it.”

The New OctaneRender 2 — Features

The new features in OctaneRender 2 include the following:

• Displacement mapping — used to give objects depth and detail, displacement mapping allows the height of points on a surface to be adjusted based on an image value
• Object motion blur — The blurring effect that simulates motion of inanimate objects in a rendered scene is supported and can be applied independently of camera movement.
• Vertex motion blur — The blurring effect associated with geometry deformations, such as movement of a character’s arms or legs.
• Hair and fur — An optimized hair render primitive is now available to allow rendering of hair or fur while reducing memory usage by 20 times compared to previous processes. OctaneRender™ 2 also simulates the distribution and fluidity of movement of those primitives.
• OpenSubDiv surfaces — Pixar’s powerful library for fast refinement of subdivision surfaces is integrated in OctaneRender™, a feature that’s most useful for animation of objects.
• Rounded Edges — Artists have the ability to easily and efficiently round the sharp edges of geometric objects without modifying and reloading the geometry. The process is done during rendering by special shader algorithms that recalculate normals near the sharp edges and corners to make them appear smooth allowing for the tuning of edge sharpness in real-time throughout rendering.
• Random color textures for instances — Useful for easily modifying the colors of instances which otherwise have the same material.
• Improved sky rendering —  Using HDRI + Sun, OctaneRender™ 2 enables the use of textures as sky backgrounds and ensures that objects in the scene accurately reflect the loaded sky texture.
• Local DB — OctaneRender™ 2 sports a cleaner, more organized workspace with a new folder structure that allows users to create packages of nodes, node graphs, and node trees, and organize them in folders along with thumbnails for easy identification.
• Region rendering — To save time on test renders, this feature allows users to specify a region in the scene and partially preview rendered results in real-time.
• Network rendering — The rendering process can be made faster than ever by leveraging remote GPUs on render slaves connected via the network.
• New stereo rendering modes — Rendering modes such as off-axis and parallel camera placement in combination with left/right/split screen/anaglyphic output options to allow improved stereo rendering.
• Compatibility with Brigade — OctaneRender™ 2 features expanded integration with Brigade, OTOY’s cloud rendering technology for photorealistic next-generation games. Within Brigade, users can now open scenes created in OctaneRender™ and walk through those scenes in real-time over the cloud.

For more information about OTOY OctaneRender™ 2, visit: http://render.otoy.com/features.php.

Availability and Cost

OctaneRender™ 2 is now available as a standalone client for 299 Euros for new users, or 99 Euros as an upgrade. It can be downloaded at http://render.otoy.com/shop/. OctaneRender™ 2 is also available via Octane Cloud Workstation on Amazon EC2, and as plugins for Autodesk’s 3ds Max® and Trimble’s SketchUp with plugins for other popular 3D modeling applications rolling out over the next few weeks. For a limited time, users who upgrade to OctaneRender™ 2 can also upgrade an existing plugin license at no additional cost to make use of an available OctaneRender™ 2 plugin or receive a voucher towards a forthcoming plugin.