Quote - shedofjoy wrote: my thoughts exactly 99 euros now and who knows how much later? how can they expect a group of customers who are largly hobbiests to commit 99euros  when they dont know the final price,i like many poser users am of a limited budget and am very wary of spending money on the beta when the total cost could end up being anything out of reach of my kind. if they want us to go for their software tell us whilst the beta is out how much it will be on final release.or is that just too logical?

Hobbyists were not the initial target market and I don't think they are now. Architects/product designers wanting fast unbiased renders were/are the target market according to a few old posts from the developers. Hobbyists just are "really interested" so now DAZ and Poser plugins are being worked on by a couple of DAZ and Poser users (specifically Paul for Poser) - not the developers of Octane - though I believe they are helping when  needed. But if you spend time in their forum, you will find most renders (the really good ones) are architect or product related, many pros posting with a hobbyist here and there. The appeal for the hobbyist has been the low beta price and the use of more affordable Nvidia cards. It does read in the new FAQ like the purchase of Refractive Software by OTOY changed the original beta plan. I bet they forgot to update the original Beta info page as there is no mention of OTOY in the text on it like the FAQ has.

It's been in beta much, much longer than anyone thought it would be early on, so they probably don't know when all the v1.0 features will be working or even be willing to lock in a price as that could be a vastly different economic climate if and when they ever come out of beta.

The important thing, though, is that it does work and will get much of what you want to do in an unbiased render using full spectrum light without the cheats biased render engines use very quickly (relative to CPU unbiased render engines). But also remember, that it can't do everything a CPU biased or unbiased render engine can do (like regular LuxRender), including, I believe motion blur for imported animation. Internal camera motion blur or platter style animations computed completely in the card however can be done with motion blur. To get motion blur with rendered frames from imported animation using a plugin, you will have to post process them with  something like ReelSmart Motion Blur for After Effects.

Besides having to reduce your texture count and size, (if nobody already mentioned this) you have to remember that all the calculations including the final render are done in the graphics card video RAM. If you do a really large size render, you better have the memory to hold that image until it's ready to be saved. One of the good things about Octane, though, is the ability of its shader system to approximate photo real textures using colors, specular, IOR, etc. settings with maybe some smaller sized bump maps much more efficiently than with full resolution, full color image maps. (Use Float Texture for greyscale bump maps to save VRAM - use Float Image for larger resolution diffuse (color) or normal maps.)

Kevin