Cloud graphics company and GPU-rendering technology innovator, OTOY, Inc., has unveiled this week the latest version of OctaneRender 3. OctaneRender 3 transforms the best production-ready GPU renderer into a state-of-the-art VFX juggernaut, reports the company.
The latest OctaneRender 3 incorporates a wide variety of the latest emerging standards on GPU rendering, including Open Shader Language (OpenSL) and OpenVDB for particle simulation, while introducing features never seen before in any production renderer. These industry first features include volumetric light field primitives and procedural microfacet displacement primitives.
For those who follow the 3D industry closely those are terms you likely have not heard of before, because they describe all new types of rendering features.
01 – OctaneRender 3 offers stunning new features. This image shows off the new volumetric rendering technology. (image: OTOY. All rights reserved.)
OctaneRender 3 also packs numerous new support and tools for the gaming industry, including both live and offline baking tool chain for game engines such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity. The new features offer simple “one-click” artist-driven publishing of navigable baked scenes, plus full cinematic content authoring for HTML 5, VR, and AR, using scripting nodes directly from applications such as 3DS Max, Maya and Adobe Photoshop.
OctaneRender 3 Features
Here are some of the most important new features in the latest version:
- Volumetric Rendering –OctaneRender 3 supports the ability to render particulate matter such as clouds, smoke, fog, and fire with varying densities and introduces a unique native primitive type for incredibly detailed micro-surface displacement volumes and surfaces required to render photorealistic natural and organic materials. Dreamworks’ OpenVDB is also supported for direct in-camera rendering of particle simulations.
- Open Shader Language (OpenSL) support –Through OpenSL, content creators have the ability to build their own materials, procedural textures, and shaders, taking advantage of what is quickly becoming an industry standard while maintaining the exceptional performance OctaneRender is known for.
- OpenCL Support –OctaneRender 3 will support the broadest range of processors possible using OpenCL to run on Intel CPUs with support for out-of-core geometry, OpenCL FPGAs and ASICs, and AMD GPUs.
- Deep Pixel Rendering –OctaneRender 3 adds deep pixel rendering support, as well as live connecting of DCC and compositing apps through Octane plug-ins for Pixologic’s Zbrush and The Foundry’s NUKE. OctaneRender 3 will also ship with a built in plugin for Adobe Photoshop that will properly handle multi-layer EXR files and support live deep pixel layer composting within Photoshop. Artists can open, create, and save ORBX media files introduced in OctaneRender 3, including planar and volumetric light fields, directly within Adobe Photoshop.
- Advanced live texture baking –A feature that’s most beneficial for use in real-time game engines, OctaneRender 3 supports unbiased GPU texture baking (UV or volumetric) of global illumination, spherical harmonics and 8D light fields in Unreal Engine 4 and Unity plugins.
- Infinite mesh and polygon size –OctaneRender 3 removes all limits on the maximum allowed primitive and triangle count.
- FBX and PTEX support –OctaneRender 3 supports importing data from Autodesk’s FBX file format and Disney’s PTEX texture file format.
- Split Render Passes –OctaneRender 3 allows artists to split render passes into raw lighting and albedo passes, and adds fine-grained reflection, shadow and illumination casting controls per object or layer. These elements can also be built into the export, whether it is a light field, VR scene, or a movie file.
- New plugins –While previous versions of OctaneRender have support LUA plugins through scripting nodes, OctaneRender 3 adds C plugins and portable LLVM-based API support in ORBX packages.
OctaneRender 3 is fully configurable at the user-interface (UI) level. The user can transform gizmos and lockdown windows into various positions.
The unveiling comes with the news that OTOY will be inviting select users to participate in the alpha release of OctaneRender 3 this summer, with a full release slated for the second half of the year. To learn more visit them here: www.otoy.com