Additional OTOY Octane details?

I've seen the videos on Octane in Unity and was curious about more information on the application of it.

• Does it require the scene to be static or baked/non-interactive?
• Is it possible to use it realtime and with interactive scenes if given enough horsepower? Eg, make a game that uses it all the time.
• How does this tie into the standard renderer workflow? Is it a scene-specific setting?
• Do custom shaders work or is the Standard shader required on everything?
• What are the prerequisites for using it? Are complex lighting setups from an external application required for it to render properly in Unity or can we just drop it in for auto-magic awesomeness?

Just fishing for more information in general.

 

> Does it require the scene to be static or baked/non-interactive?

No dynamic scenes work . You can move Unity objects in Editor and it will update live in the Octane viewport. Octane currently has to bake vertex data every frame for character animation, but that will be fixed before release as we are adding bone/skinning into Octane 3.07 which will ship with Unity 2017.

> Is it possible to use it realtime and with interactive scenes if given enough horsepower? Eg, make a game that uses it all the time.

it's possible in Editor, but we will wait until Octane 4 before we encourage people publish games for local playback using path tracing. The concept with light field baking is you can still get real time perf. (even in VR/AR) + Octane quality using this system in place of traditional lightmapping over mesh data.

> How does this tie into the standard renderer workflow? Is it a scene-specific setting?

If you enable Octane, you get an Octane render target for your scene, and it will pull in all Unity assets. If you drop in an ORBX package with lighting and more set up, then you can use that as your environment and mix Octane + Unity assets in the Octane viewport. Unity PBR shaders and assets map automatically into Octane, but any Octane imported elements have the full Octane shaders and tools exposed in Unity Editor. You can create a materiel map override for a Unity object and give it an Octane material, but then the Unity viewport will go to baked OR lighting or blank material in the rasterized viewport.

> Do custom shaders work or is the Standard shader required on everything?

Standard shaders for now, but anything will be possible in 3.1 with OSL, which can translate arbitrary shader input.

> What are the prerequisites for using it? Are complex lighting setups from an external application required for it to render properly in Unity or can we just drop it in for auto-magic awesomeness?

If you drop your Unity scene into a great octane environment (even daylight system), it will look great too.

 

Thanks for the info, really looking forward to testing things out!

 

Should have our first alpha going for a round of wider testing tomorrow

 

WoW!!!! So we will be able to put our hands on alpha tommorrow ???

 

Wantwantwant

 

Just PLEASE implement realtime rendering in the future. It's not far from now when PC's will be able to use realtime pathtracing in games. I really hope that you will stick to the plan on bringing it with Octane 4.

 

How do I get part of this alpha?? Lol so excited for this stuff making ton of vr/mr experiences would love to test it out and prep when you finally make it realtime with interactive elements

 

Exciting! Let us know if you need some testers.

 

So excited.

 

Yes! this is good news indeed. I'm also very exited about this and interested in trying the alpha so please let us know when and where we can find it!

 

I'm waiting for Octane / Unity to take VR filmmaking up a notch.
I managed to get this scene running on an S6edge/ gearVR (and recording on the S6phone simultaneously. All assets are from the asset store). I think if rendered with Octane, this would be truly Cinematic VR, indistinguishable from a live action set

How do I get to be on the alpha test list? Would love to talk about this at Film Festivals I speak at.

 

Will it be an asset? I thought it will be implemented in Unity 2017, but Beta doesn't have it

 

Little pigs, little pigs, let me in! (To the apha testing, please) ;-)

 

Just to be clear, Octane will be used purely for non-real time uses? Basically, rendering cut scenes, videos, etc?

 

Is it possible it will be able to be used for real time pathtracing (I don't know if anybody asked that question or not)?

Thanks

EDIT- found question answered in 2nd to first post.

Will it work with Intel graphic cards?

 

Jules Urbach posted this https://twitter.com/JulesUrbach/status/835031923370008576/photo/1

I might be incorrect here, but I don't think that anything from Intel (besides maybe Xeon Phi) is fast enough to compete with the current line up of Nvidia cards within Octane. Otoy has also announced that they're working with PowerVR to speed up ray tracing as well, but not much more beyond that has been said.

Having said that, I can't wait to get my hands on the integration of Octane within Unity. It's a huge deal in terms of content creation pipelines.

 

It would be great to see another post from @OTOY with a few details on an open alpha or beta. Excited!

 

@PikleJoos yeah Intel with octane would be amazing in Unity, it would make it broader than just NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards. @OTOY from that picture of Intel WIP, is it possible or wouldn't be much a problem If it worked in unity?

 

My Nvidia cards are ready so I'm not dependent on Intel . I do like the idea of Octane working on Intel and AMD though, because it means that more people would be able to use it. I'm not sure if a lot of people here are interested in video, but I find this very interesting and it involves Unity/Octane as well:

 

Awesome!!! I heard of that video, haven't seen it, it's cool XD

 

I've been thinking about the idea of using a lightfield cube as a background for game level. I think it could work nicely in certain situations. For example if the level takes place in the top floors of a high rise building. So the background would be a large cityscape captured from the air. It could be rendered or it could be a photographed miniature (using that facebook camera tech). Normally the player can only move slightly in the dof6 stereo environment, but since nothing in that background is close by I think it could be scaled up. So when the player moves from one side of the building to the other he would see that background changes position and it wouldn't feel like it's infinitely far away. I'm curious if this is actually plausible or am I missing something.

 

Otoy could explain it better, but it does sound like ORBX could be used for such purposes. https://uploadvr.com/gdc-2017-otoy-bringing-mixed-reality-light-field-streaming-unity/
Jules Urbach even said this in the comments: "Light fields replace baked geometry in games and bring holographic rendering into films". I'm sure that once we're able to play with this tech, we'll get a better idea of what's specifically possible. It sounds incredibly exciting .

 

It even seems possible to have geometry go behind the the hologram background since there is depth information. So in the case of my example a helicopter could maybe fly behind a building. It does seem like there are a lot of way to blend the holograms and actual geometry. To me that feels very very promising.

 

That would be awesome!!! Will Brigade be in Unity with Octane Render?

 

I can't wait for a public alpha or beta version.
Any news @OTOY ?

 

Yeah I'm also very interested in testing this out. So hopefully there will be some public test soon.

 

Does anybody knows if it will be possible to import an orbx file with complete tectures directy into Unity after being exported from another software with the octane plugin? How it will be possible to set collisions and gravity if the orbx is considered one object? Really curious.....

 

Found a newer video from Upload VR, audio-less look at the interface within Unity.

 

This video has an example where 3D-objects go both behind and in front of the 360-video.

 

Any new news @OTOY for the octane render?

 

You guys rock. Keep posting these. Thanks!

Jules, let us at it!

 

@OTOY - I read on reddit a little while ago that you were planning on letting us bake lightmaps in Unity using Octane - is that still on the feature list?

 

Didn't see that, that's awesome @PikleJoos thanks!

 

In the previous video Jules Urbach did mention running the progressive lightmapper with octane. He also mentioned it was roughly 10 times faster.

 

Hooray!

 

@OTOY, in the vision summit 2017 Jules said they were close to finishing their alpha tests and was going to put Octane in some 2017 beta. And 2017 will hopefully be out of beta on June 15 (what was said by Unity, if it's wrong let me know ) or July (from the roadmap), does that mean it's going to be in a public beta soon?

 

They replied to me on Twitter on Saturday. It looks like it is coming soon:

"First alpha in a few weeks (hopefully). Testing in 2017.1b5 and looking good!"
https://twitter.com/OTOY/status/865964225021190144

 

Awesome @mrmdesign looked at your latest post on that twitter thread, your absolutely right!!! thank you!

 

I have been hounding them a little bit
I feel bad but I am really excited about this. I am like a dog with a bone.

 

I'm sure they're happy and so is Unity, that users are taking a lot of interest. Don't feel bad

 

ive been doing a little bit of the same, finding news on when its going to be released. Thanks again @mrmdesign @hippocoder

 

Oh one more question @OTOY, will we need to download anything extra from Unity 2017 for it to work? And will there be tutorials on how to use Octane in Unity? Also will it work with Intel gpu's?

 

Octane render only works on Nvidia cards so those features won't work. Even if they did it wouldn't be very optimal since those Intel cards have very weak performance. The 6dof panorams will probably work regardless of GPU.

 

Thank you for pinging me on twitter and making me aware of all the new posts on this thread! There was a lot covered in the Vision 17 talk, which I hope answered a lot of questions.

Right now, we are testing a near final alpha build inside 2017.1 b5 , and coordinating with Unity how best to release to testers once everyone feels we have a version that is ready to go.

As of the latest build, loading Octane in a 2017.1 happens auto-magically using a simple C# script bootstrapper fromUnity Editor. GPU support is NVIDIA only, but we're working hard to add AMD (at least on win10).

We plan to release one or more sample projects with the alpha drop, like the one in the Vision17 video showing 'out of the box' cinematic rendering with Unity standard PBR assets as well as ORBX imported PBR scenes/assets (ORBX PBR interchange files, which packlage all Octane source lighting/materials/scene/volumetric/environment/shader info and more, can be exported from ~25+ Octane DCC app plug-ins, including Unity Editor as of this next release)

 

Yes, we're working on it right now, and hoping to get it in there by 2017.1 launch or shortly thereafter.

 

Will it be possible to mix octanes realtime rendering with baked stuff? For example have baked lights and realtime reflections. Something like that would be perfect for archviz.

 

No worries! Thank you for being so responsive and sorry for pestering you a bit. Every time I see anything Unity + Otoy related to AR, VR and MR (or are we all calling it XR now - I lose track) my excitement levels peak. ☺

 

If archviz environment isn't dynamic (or if it's just linearly temporal), the baked light field XYZT render output contains all you need for perfect refletions when moving through the scene, plus R/T mix of Octane lighting layers (e.g. real time multi-light).

On top of this we are working on dynamic objects and lights coming from Unity/Octane scene graph - like what we showed with the flashlight probe in the FB 6DOF video demo in Unity.