Anyone considering upgrading should take a look at this thread first:

There are also a lot of changes internal to the plugin which have changed the structure of how the Octane nodes are connected.  So not much point comparing speeds.  Most people have reported that images are becoming noise-free with fewing samples (and less time) though (due to the changes in how emitters are managed). And if speed is an issue, cloud rendering is just around the corner.

There are other positive things to come from the changes above - for example when you have "Live Update" on, the plugin is not recreating mesh nodes and reloading the geometry any more - it's only updating the vertex and normal positions - so that is way faster.  Similarly when rendering animations - only the vertex and normal positions are updated each frame - not the entire mesh.  Also, you can load the level 0 subd of the Poser mesh now and subd inside Octane, with initial tests on Andy showing a 2-3 x times scene load time reduction.  The changes also mean you can Network Render, and when you change part of your Octane scene (the camera position for example), only the camera coord change gets sent to the slave PC, so it is updated almost instantly in a lot of cases.  And finally, the node structure changes mean that you can export animations to Alembic format (wrapped inside the OCS/ORBX Octane format) - so scene assets (figure and their animations) can be exports and mix/matched inside Octane Standalone.  Whilst this won't mean a lot to the hobbist, it is critical for studio who use this workflow.

Paul

Creator of PoserPhysics
Creator of OctaneRender for Poser
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