dr_berniw wrote: "All this 'over-excitment' about Octane for Carrara is similar to the cheering when Luxus for Carrara was released. Everybody was in tears. Finally a renderer that we can use to express our boundless creative talents!"

I don't see a lot of "over-excitement" here over the Octane plugin, except for maybe me. My excitement comes from actually having used Octane with both the Poser demo plugin and the DS beta plugin. My excitement comes from having actually used Octane. I’ve experienced the workflow and quality of two plugins for Octane from two programs that I’m quite familiar with. I am extremely impressed with the performance of Octane, the quality of the plugins, and the quality of the renders produce by Octane from the plugins. I also understand the limitations with GPU rendering, and the cost of Octane relative to Carrara, and have been very upfront with both. I understand that Octane isn't a good fit for everyone, but for those that it is, it could make a huge positive impact on their productivity.

I really don't see where you’re getting "All this over-excitement" from, unless maybe your referring to the thread in the DAZ Carrara forum. If that's the case, then maybe you should post your query(s) there, where some long term and more knowledgeable Octane users could respond.

Now on to the Luxus/Lux Render issue. Having used Lux Render starting with Reality 1 for DS, I didn't quite understand the excitement over having a plugin for Lux with Carrara. Don't get me wrong, Lux is a fantastic unbiased renderer. It even has some features that are "better", more accurate, or easier to use than those available in Carrara (caustics, and sss for example). But, Lux isn't the elusive magic "Make Art" button. I think the excitement over Luxus was a combination of several things including; 1) there was finally an external renderer available for Carrara just like with the pro apps, 2) many people had wanted a "fully 100% unbiased" renderer in Carrara for years, 3) there was a bit of app envy - DS had 2 Lux plugins, Poser had 2 Lux plugins, pro apps have numerous external renderer plugins, and Carrara had ...... zero, 4) I think some people thought that Luxus/Lux was closer to a "make art button" than it really is.

I have Luxus for Carrara (and for DS), and play with it from time to time with Carrara, but I can typically achieve results that I like just as well using Carrara's internal renderer much faster, and with less shader work. Lux is much slower than Carrara!!! Just like Carrara, the Luxus plugin is just another tool in my tool box. 

dr_bernie wrote: "And then it flopped. Luxus for Carrara didn't even reach version 1.0.1. I bought it and I never even installed it. There were a few images rendered with Luxus posted in RO's Carrara galleries, and then nothing."

IMHO, I don't think anyone could say Luxus was a success or a flop from the existence of renders in the galleries here. My guess is that very few serious Carrara users post images here, but I could be wrong. Luxus not reaching version 1.0.1 isn't necessarily an indicator of success either, it could be an indication that Spheric Labs did an excellent job of coding, and there haven't been any major bugs reported or any need to add more features. Obviously, if you didn't install it, you wouldn't have a clue how good or bad the plugin was. The DS plugin hasn't received a update since before the Carrara plugin was released, does that mean it's a flop as well?

dr_bernie wrote: "Considering what happened to Luxus, and considering that most plugins for Carrara don't get beyond version 1.1.x, I suspect that the same will happen to Octane for Carrara, so I'am not holding my breathe on it."

**
**Who knows?? It may, or may not be a big success, only time will tell. But this can be said for any software or plugin. The developer takes a calculated risk, if the market isn't there, then development stops.

The way you are intermingling Lux and Octane, I think you may be a bit unclear that Lux Render and Octane Render, at this point, are not "competing" products, or even close to being competing products. The only similarity between the two is that they are both unbiased render engines. That is where the similarities end. Lux is a CPU based unbiased render engine, and Octane is a purely Cuda/GPU base unbiased render engine. Some of the confusion may be from the CPU/GPU hybrid renderer being developed for Lux, and the SLG (Simple Lux GPU)  GPU renderer that was a separate projuct, but over the past year was brought in as a part of Lux development. At this point, both the Hybrid and SLG render engines are in development, not recommended for production use, and not recommended for the average user with either Luxus or Reality.

Ocatne is targeting an entirely different market demographic than Lux. Therefor you can't really extrapolate the acceptance of a plugin for Lux (or in this case the perceived acceptance/use) as a proxy for how well a plugin for Octane will do. IMHO I'm really not worried. If it doesn't do well, that's OK, because the user interface is very consistent between the Octane plugins for different applications, so I can easily use DS, Poser, Blender, C4D, etc. to continue to reap the benefits of my investment in Octane. Unlike trying to render in Poser, DS, and Carrara, where you have to know, and be able to adjust for each applications own unique shader/lighting system, the Octane plugins use the same shader/lighting/rendering system for every application that their is a plugin for. So your shader/lighting/rendering knowledge/skills are fully transferable from one 3D app to the next.

dr_bernie wrote: "Carrara's native renderer is OK. It can produce acceptable results, but it is slow and, compared to Shade's jaw-dropping renderer, it is only good for amateur work."

I think there are professional users of Carrara that might take exception with you statement that Carrara's renderer is only good for armature work, but that would be for them to respond to. However, since this is a thread on Octane render, I’ll see your video and raise you three more. Can Shade (or Embree) do this? Keep in mind your seeing unbiased render results on screen - not faster biased approximations (well, the user may be running the direct lighting setting - which does use very very high quality ambient occlusion).

Octane 4 GTX Titans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqf1n2xq80&noredirect=1

Octane 8 GTX 580’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1IRQTqMMY&noredirect=1

Or, Octane with just one GTX 590:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmukImTkmHY&noredirect=1

Embree might be a nice inclusion to Carrara, unfortunately you're talking to people here that have no decision making power over the direction of Carrara. DAZ3D staff seldom visit the DAZ forums, and almost never visit the forums here. You need to either take you crusade directly to DAZ by submitting a feature request, or you're interest in Embree might possibly get noticed in the Carrara forums at DAZ, but they will never get noticed here.

While we are talking about Embree - what other applications use it besides C4D, Simlab (which is actually using biased rendering to get their amazing display quality/performance), and Vray? I haven't been able to find any others. If Embree is as easy to implement as you seem to think, then why aren't more render engines using it? Maybe because it isn't that easy to implement, or?????

Also, Embree doesn't have/support volumetrics or shader based hair (like Carrara has). This may be why it isn't "everywhere". In order to keep the volumetrics/hair available you would need to create a hybrid render engine that would use the "old" renderer for volumetrics and hair - this would require quite a bit of development/engineering time and resources.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to contact SphericLabs, or one of the Carrara plugin developers to see if there is any interest in creating Carrara plugin for Vray, which is an excellent render engine that has implemented Embree.

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