Octane in Unity

To use the coming Octane extension in Unity (might arrive around 2017), it seems that we need to use Nvidia GPUs. I am going to buy a graphics card soon and this parameter helped me narrow my choices.

 

All games will probably move to some form of GPU tracing at some point, better sooner than later. Key interesting point here is that it's chicken and egg.

When Carmack made games, GPUs sold better if they ran his games faster. That drove the whole market.

Imagine when a flood of indie games hit steam with experimental path tracing option? Going to be a lot of demand for faster path tracing.

The concern with nVidia GPUs is valid - it can't ever be more than a literal otoy OR viz/prerender system while that remains because it excludes too much of the market including consoles... however:

The question of the hour is: can we use this in actual games, or is it planned to just be for offline rendering?

 

It would be nice to see for actual in-game..

The only things I heard him mention though was Images and 360 Video or whatever.
Didn't hear him say anything about actual in game.... Unity would definitely be the most beast engine graphically in an instant if that happened, no and's if's or buts to compare lol.

 

Yep I don't see them being brave enough yet to supply it for actual games... or are they.

 

Thanks for the feedback

"Broad cross-platform support: Using OTOY’s CUDA cross-compiler, OctaneEngine and OctaneImager is expected to support all possible CPU and GPU devices and platforms, including support for Mac platforms, and AMD GPUs."
Key phrase : is expected.

"Imagine when a flood of indie games hit steam with experimental path tracing option"
Most probably it will take some years.

"can we use this in actual games, or is it planned to just be for offline rendering?"
Perhaps Dragon's Lair - like interactive apps, in 360, which is cool and unexploited - yet.

I think a second hand 970 - around 180 euro - has a nice cost / performance ratio now, 1060 3gb is around 230 euro and 1070 is around 480. No desktop VR for another year or two for me.

 

At the very least it could be used for lightmap baking.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/5au9gc/otoys_jules_urbach_on_octanerender_unity/d9jvr9v/

 

I am looking forward to this.

The thing is that I just got a new amd card ...

According to this: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2016/03/11/otoy-cuda-compiler/1
Otoy is claiming to have octane working with amd cards by reverse engineering the cuda code.

If nvidia will allow this is another thing though.

 

Yeah I got an AMD as well... I really hope they allow it, will definitely help.

 

I..I..I.. can't wait, i need it now.

 

I think it would be useful to use it to bake to defuse as an option and to bake lightmaps. however the new lightmap tech might be able to do a better jobof baking lightmaps.

 

What happened to ARM's PowerVR ray-tracing chip, it looked like that was on the cards at one point?

 

this site is good for comparing features,
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-970-vs-GeForce-GTX-1060

 

At Unite the presentation was exclusively focused on offline usage.

 

One thing to note though is that Otoy also owns the Brigade, which is specifically for real-time applications... I wouldn't be surprised if they plan on porting that tech to Unity eventually (I really hope they do!).

 

I honestly can not wait until this happens. I am so excited!
This article has me chomping at the bit!
http://uploadvr.com/otoy-building-one-vrs-important-technologies/

As a pro subscriber, is there any way I can get in early as a tester?

 

Well if it's just for prerenders or cube maps then I'm really not interested. I'm only interested in it for actual game rendering - I'd support that early, even if framerate sucks.

 

I agree as well.
Being Steam doesn't take non-ingame Screen Shots anymore, makes this almost useless outside of movies if it's only pre-renders.

I'd rather deal with 20 FPS frames than taking snap shots that I can't even use on Steam haha.

 

For me it's about the fact that if we build it, gpu manufacturers will meet the demand of gamers playing it.

If there wasn't any accelerated Quake, we'd probably just be mid-DX9 era today, things only move as quickly as the forces acting on them.

 

"Soon Light field renders in texture baking and eventually brigade + PowerVR for real time path tracing in Unity games, but the latter is a few steps out. Also octane GPU baking system can power progressive texture baking inside unity. Didn't have time to show that during keynote."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/5au9gc/otoys_jules_urbach_on_octanerender_unity/d9jvr9v/

 

We're not far off things like brigade / Octane now TBH.. Having worked with VXGI and SVOGI variants, like the screenie below looks pretty realistic to me (VXGI):

The issue being VXGI isn't actually that well optimised compared to other SVOGI / SVOTI solutions, plus of course it runs better with Nvidia HW.. It would of been awesome if AMD could of made a well optimised equivalent that's multi-GPU..

If nothing else you can have SVOGI and 60FPS even with outdoor scenes that stretch a fair distance on what's classed as mid range GPU's today, just look at CE.

 

The Otoy scenes on GearVR are some of the best I have seen.
The way the specular highlights seem to move when you look around on what I presumed was a still render always confuddled me. Now I know the the lightfield magic is behind this wizardry, I want some for myself!

I have used Unity to render 360 degree video's and still 360 images for clients using the excellent VR Panorama Pro asset displaying the output on a sphere with the Easy Movie Texture asset and packaging up for use with Google Cardboard.

I have even used it for still 2d product render images and walkthrough video's. I just love the speed and quality of Unity's realtime PBR rendering engine combined with Cinematic Image Effects, Punk Labs Shadow Softener, Cinema Suite for sequencing animation and various other bits and pieces.

When you don't have to worry about realtime frame rates you can push things up a notch. Unity is such an amazing and versatile bit of software and I love the fact that it's full potential is being realized via third parties like Otoy.

This is going to make a massive improvement to the above workflows!
It's almost like a dream come true for me!

I do also use Unity for realtime stuff - AR mostly at the moment as well as a few side game / app projects.

 

Hi, do you know if it possible use VR Panorama with Octane Render? Thanks

 

creating a panorama? yeah that is easy just create the pbr render target object the change the camera

 

Seems limited now, I want it at runtime (could still be slow/background) for pre-viz, art etc.
Also you can pay for multi-gpu support but who has multiple gpus? Or is that a network solution?

 

I've done some initial tests, and things look pretty good. I'm stuck on two tricky parts, and I was hoping someone might have some suggestions:

Foliage (Looks like alpha doesn't work on speed tree stuff)
Water (I have no idea how to do this right. The courtyard scene wasn't really appropriate)

 

After installing Octane in my own test scene, I found many counterproductive aspects:
First, Octane works fine with standard mats but not with other shaders apparently (alpha issues as @BlakeScheurs, 6-sided skybox shader not rendered). It tends to force you to reedit your mats using octane shader (which is obviously not exposed and available for custom versions). There is an option to override Unity's standard shader, but not even able to catch your albedo map... I felt too lazy to reassign each of my textures for the try out ;°)
Secondly, I was totally scared when I observed that every single piece of mesh had a script added by the plug-in! As you can expect, your scene won't be legible for real time anymore, bloated by so many scripts. Not fair.
Also, you have to re-enable the renderer each time you open the project, that's ok, but I couldn't find where to save its (numerous) settings, on the contrary of the above-mentioned horrible addition to the scene.
Lastly, Octane won't let you work offline, and, as an add-on to (and separate process on top of) Unity, it's really heavy (the project crashes atm - I guess I have to kill other apps first ^^).
I show my test scene just to be clear on the "test material", obviously showing my lack in fine-tuning Octane, but I'm now wondering if I want to go further with it.



I'm not against an offline renderer added to Unity but... it looks like Octane plug-in is a radical fork in the workflow: go full off line rendering, and forget Unity's graphic pipeline, which sounds silly.

 

I'm really liking the images Octane is producing.

Even with lower quality assets you can still get very nice results.






Obviously it's not for every workflow, but I can think of a few uses where using Unity in the middle of a pipeline has suddenly become an interesting option.

A.

 

I'm also wondering about that myself. I would like to render out foliage but is that not possible in current Octane? Forget about translucency, I still have no idea how to use simple cutout. Aside from that it looks OP!