Lobo3433 posted at 1:42PM Tue, 20 August 2019 - #4359922

Thanks for sharing the info LuxXeon have you checked out the Free octane plug in for Blender from what I hear only limitation is that it will only work with on graphic card not multi-card set ups

I was just about to make a post here about that! Yes, I've downloaded and installed Otoy's free-tier version of Octane render for Blender 2.8 but haven't really tested it out fully yet. One other downside to it is that it requires a custom Blender build, so it's not really an addon in the same way as LuxCore or other plugin render engines are. The download includes the Octane Server files and a separate, custom build instance of Blender which they supply. So what this means is that to use Octane for free in Blender, you'll need to install another instance of Blender just for the Octane addon, which Otoy includes in the download. The most current version they had availble when I last checked was Blender 2.8 rc3, so not even the stable build release of 2.8. I'm not sure if that is how it's always been for the Blender Octane addon, but that's how it is for the free tier.

Other than that, I did have some trouble at first with the Octane addon recognizing my RTX 2070 card but once I enabled the addon in preferences and restarted the custom build, it finally picked it up. Rendering was fast, but I can't say it was much faster than Cycles in the latest version of 2.8 when I use both the RTX 2070 and also the CPU together. Octane doesn't support using the CPU in addition to the GPU, but that's not really a big deal. Sometimes the CPU can bottleneck your GPU if your card is very high end but your CPU processor isn't up to the task. Also, I noticed Octane doesn't seem to support pre-existing materials or environments in the scene. I had to totally rebuild a scene with Octane shaders and environment before it would give me a proper render. Another thing is that in order to use it you need to be connected to the Otoy servers with your login info. I don't know for sure, but I don't believe it will work offline.

I still have yet to take it for a true and proper test drive and compare render times with the same scenes in Cycles, but I used to work with Octane in 3dsmax so i thought I'd give this a go. So far, I'm not overjoyed by the experience. I think I might invest in the E-Cycles addon instead, which by all reviews has an incredible reputation. E-Cycles is a very optimized version of Cycles when using CUDA GPUs and promises up to 10x the render speed performance on the same hardware. Of course, E-Cycles is not free and also requires a custom build download, which I'm not entirely thrilled about. User reviews seem to claim it's even faster than Octane on the same hardware though.

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