Octane GPU Lightmapping

OTOY has released Octane 4 for PBR rendering Unity. It works great in Unity. 2017.4.3f1
It is not real time, but it includes the PBR Lightmapping feature that could be very interesting for many Unity game developers. This tread is for discussion this feature.

I've tried Lightmapping but it generates black Lightmaps. At the beginning I believe I generated the correct files but then changed the Lightmap size to 4096 and Unity crashed - out of memory. I didn't save my settings and now cannot reproduce the correct result.
If somebody archived any good result please give us an advise.
There is a tutorial at youtube but it was created for v3 and not useful for v4.

 

OK Awesome. No official forum thread for this release? its quite a remarcable event

 

Got a link?

Asset Store seems to have the old version

 

The latest version of Octane 4 engine will be find automatically and will ask you to upload.

 

My steps to get Octane 4 in Unity.
1. Install the latest Unity 2017. Seems Octane for Unity 2018 doesn't exist at this moment. I tested Octane in 2017.4.3f1
2.Open a project. Click on Octane in Main menu and Install. Probably you don't have this menu if you never installed Octane in Unity. In this case the simplest way is to install any Octane free unity asset.
3. After you installed Octane you will see new items in Octane menu. Click settings and then Load Octane button.
4. After you loaded Octane new items will appear in Octane menu. Click "Create PBR Render Target".
5. Now your scene is ready for fast physically correct rendering (not real time).
6. Add any asset in you scene. You could add assets at the beginning or in the middle of the Octane installation process, it doesn't matter.
7. Click in PBR Render Target in the Hierarchy window and the Render button in the Inspector window.

Many times I got different error messages during the instalation. Just close Unity application and run it again. Continue with the last unsuccessful step. It can happen a few times. The entire installation process will take 2-3 min.

The most important settings in of PBR Render Target in the Inspector window
1. Camera.
If you want to render the same view as in the Scene window just use the default settings: "Select Camera" - "Editor", Camera - "None". There is good feature - you can make the big render window whist covers all screen but still use the mouse to change the view in the editor ans in the render view at the same time. The render window like "transparent" for the mouse changing view actions.
You can change "Select camera" to "Game" and pick up a camera from the scene.
Change "Aperture" to 0 in "Depth of field" to make the render sharp at any distance.

2. Film setting.
Change Width/Height in Resolution to change the size of the render picture. You can click on the monitor icon button in the "PBR Viewport" (render window) and the change the window size, the render picture will fill the window.

3.Kernel
The default render type "Direct lighting kernel" is NOT physically accurate but provide very fast result and for some scenes pretty realistic result. For interior scene I would recommend to change AO distance from 3 to 0.3m
The recommended kernel is "Path tracing".
I would recommend to set "Max. samples" to 50 or even less for tests using AI denoiser (see below).

"AI light" should significantly accelerate the render but I didn't notice any different.

4. Imager
In "Spectral AI Denoiser" check "Enable Denoising". To see the denoised image click on the Main->Denoised in the render window (PBR Viewport). AI denoiser does the fantastic job for images that generated with small number "Max. samples":

500 samples, no AI denoiser


10 samples, no AI denoiser


10 samples, AI denoiser ON


Unity Asset Sci-Fi Styled Modular Pack
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/?stay#!/content/82913


"Blend"
Denoised image looks a little bit unnatural. 0.2 value makes it more noisy but look better.

"Highlight compensation" - I prefer to set it to 1

"Gamma" and "Exposure" don't work for me, I just cannot change it.



==================================================
Baking

Click on Octane -> PBR Lightmapping
Just for very first try I would recommend to set Samples around 50 and Lightmap size to 512.
Theoretically we need just to click on the "Generate PBR Lightmaps" button. The "PBR Viewport" will changed to the "baking mode" and start generating files like PBRLightmap_89_IRRADIANCE.exr and PBRLightmap_89_LIGHT_DIRECTION.png.

Unfortunately all images are black. I don't get what I am missing.

 

You missed a few steps...

 

Error 126 when trying to load Octane.

The stability of it is a F***ing joke man

 

Like you could consider mentioning w
hat is wrong...

 

My bad. I didn't mention, this is the experimental version! If you don't have time to play with this then the main step for you is
"Try again in 6 months."