The fact that they don't mention Octane could mean one of 2 things:

If  you check the galleries at http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5 I think you'll agree that a) there are a lot of professional visualisation artists using Octane, and b) the quality of their work is absolutely stunning.

One of them is from the Modo forums, the other from Lightwave's. Look at how positively they talk about Embree. None of them is actually even mentioning Octane or any other GPU based renderers as an alternative to embree or CPU based renderers.

I am currently developing the Modo plugin for Octane, and the forum post about it at the Foundry is 8 pages long (as opposed to the 1/2 page Embree post), and there is no mention of Embree in the Octane thread.

1. With Octane, in order to fit your scene into the GPU RAM, you may have to reduce your textures resolution from 2500x2500 to 256x256

I have never heard of a user needing to reduce from 2500x2500 to 256x256.  VRAM limitations are very rare - and the new 700 series cards come with between 2GB and 6GB of VRAM, and there will be a 12GB card available shortly.

2. How likely is Octane which, after several years of development, is still at its 1.2 version, to survive and make it into version 2.0 and beyond?

Otoy have announced the feature list for 1.5 and that it's release is immiennt.  There are also threads on the Otoy forums regarding 2.0. 

In another thread I believe you mentioned that you are running Carrara on an i5 laptop. Can you please explain how you plan to run Octane on it?

Your CPU and RAM as of little concern when running Octane (you just need enough RAM to be able to load the scene into the graphics card).  I run a laptop, use the on-board graphics as the display adapter, and using the GT 640M for rendering.  When rendering in Octane, there is virtually no rendering load on the CPU.  In fact, with the Modo plugin, I can simultanteously have the OpenGL viewport, Modo render viewport and Octane viewport all running at the same time and move through the scene etc with minimal lag.

A problem with a stictly based GPU renderor like Octane is it does not support displacement maps because NVIDIA does not yet. That is the reason that true professionals shy away from it. Displacement maps are key to a professional workflow.

Not sure what a "true professional" is!  I would say the majority of the users of my Octane plugins are people who make a living from rendering - does that make them a "profession" or "true professional"?  Most users who have to use a displacement map convert it to vertices or use a normal map - because "true professionals" know how to do that :-).  But I agree - displacement maps would be a big bonus, and Otoy stated this week the displacement mapping was definitely happening (in the "Features Poll" post).

Paul

Creator of PoserPhysics
Creator of OctaneRender for Poser
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