Octane Lightmapping in Unity takes seconds, not hours

Apparently OTOY is integrating Octane into Unity. That means lightmapping with the Octane engine. This scene is rendering in seconds.

IT IS GLORIOUS

https://twitter.com/JulesUrbach/status/918155975130980352

 

Octane is not speeding up Unity. This completely replaces Unity's lightmapper under the hood.

No release date has been announced. But imo it sounds like it might be available soon.

 

It is glorious! And this isn't a future release, it's using the current public release that went out to everyone last week. We just need to share the sample project shown here and create more tutorials.

 

Guess that explains why enlighten hasn't received much love in the past. Happy to see that light baking is finally done on the GPU. Looks cool!

I didn't dare to hope they'd go this far with Octane integration, but I'm very happy they did. Good job Unity!

 

And good job Otoy!

 

This is the best news ever.

 

It's a huge win. From this foundation, so much more can now be built on top (e.g. mega-texturing, light field baking). Also Octane 3.08 is dropping very soon with OSL shaders which is also a game changer inside Unity

 

Hello from a hobbyist perspective, can you guys explain what is exactly is Octane? In addition, what is the benefit for the developer of having the octane engine as opposed to what is there now? Only asking as I am not too familiar with lightmapping. Thanks in advance.

 

Is this for baking maps? or also for realtime GI?

 

i want my days wasted baking lightmaps back

 

Wait what am I seeing?

As a person that has been lightbaking scenes for years is the holy grail of GI baking finally at our doorstep.

 

They've made some sample scenes available and the website suggests it's going to be out this year.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=relevance/query=publisher:30723

Early pricing information is available on their roadmap.

https://unity.otoy.com/roadmap/

 

@Ryiah OTOY came into the thread after I posted

The functionality is already available, just waiting on a how to from OTOY

 

I watched his talk at Unite and interview from a few days ago (see Unity's youtube channel) and it's exciting stuff.

I tried their renderer inside Unity and it worked fine, but it's the lightmapper I'm interested in.

Lightmapping is where you calculate the lighting and turn it into a texture, so your CPU/GPU doesn't have to do any work in-game. They are integrating one of their products OctaneRenderer into Unity, so we can use that to generate the lightmaps, instead of Enlighten/Progressive. Their CEO said recently that it's been about 10x faster or more than Unity's Progressive lightmapper, because it's using the GPU.

It can also act as a general renderer, so you can render out cinema-quality images/movies with it.

It's not for real-time gameplay. I think that will come with Brigade.

 

So this already looks neat as it is.

Is this editor only? With bakes that fast I'd love to put them at load time instead of having hundreds of extra megs of data for my players to download.

 

• Powered by up to 20 GPUs

Challenge Accepted.

 

Not just that, but it could also be used for procedural/user content?

 

In case anyone missed it, here is the OctaneRender interview from Unite Austin 2017.

 

Does this support global illumination, though?

 

So how come on the otoy forum there is a thread asking about lightmap baking release date, and someone from otoy replied saying that they are working with Unity to get some edge cases resolved, and will inform us when there is more concrete information?

Re: Lightmap Baking release date

 

Interesting...this comes at a great moment in time as I am looking into a couple new projects and light mapping like this makes one of those projects much less of a hassle.

 

Wonder what the restrictions are for outdoor forest type scenes or big nature environments?

 

I think the biggest question in most people's minds is what will it not play nice with. It's one thing to show off a simple scene. It's an entirely other case to show it working with some of the most popular assets that themselves impact or integrate with lighting in some way.

 

@OTOY: do similar constraints like with blender's cycles engine apply, like the whole scene at once needing to fit into VRAM?

 

Definitely a big part of working with unity for environments is using all the plugins it takes to make unity look good. Does it work with RTP for terrains or any other terrain plugin. Does it work with speed trees or unity tree creator trees and how does it look with the terrain engine etc. So many questions and eventually hopefully soon we get answers and some real world examples of all this goodness working with all the things that make unity.

 

this x 1000. I've already posted several times to the Otoy forum that @elbows linked to asking this very question:

"Is it confirmed whether Octane lightmap baking will support all Unity light types, including emissive materials and IBL (cubemap), for the initial release?"

From what I can tell, the plugin is compatible with standard shader.

 

Thank you for taking the time to explain this. Appreciate it

 

It all sounds great.. but, it's not working for me. Unity 2017.2 - ORBX files from Otoy's Asset store demos are not loading at all. Octane freezes Unity.

 

@OTOY I wish one day renders my game in real-time. Is OTOY will same day make at least the lightmapping with the Octane engine?

 

Looks like now OTOY Octane Render includes: Real-time Render and... Lightmapping !!

...WOW...yes I miss that...

Probably in 5~10yr the GPU tech will render this in real-time 60fps.

 

Any news about release date ?

 

Any visual comparison between octane and enlighten released?

 

I hope that the last pic is after just one pass and you can get it better?

 

The last picture looks a lot like what you'd get in blender. Except the white glowing outline, of course.

Hopefully this doesn't come with its own version of "how do I get rid of fireflies?" problem.

 

Will it take years to get good results ? Enlighten has taken lot of time to maturate or bring mixed mode.

 

It's obvious that PLM quality is the best one in all lightmappers
But octane should be good if has some features :
1. Faster bake time
2. Less RAM usage
3 . Transparented (or glass) materials support
4. Normal map baking features

 

fireflies are noises during render

 

Fairly certain he knows what noise is

 

@aliyeredon2 just to be clear, the Octane comparison image you posted was *not* from within Unity, correct?

 

Inside unity but from Octane Viewport

 

What about distributed rendering e.g. cloud based GPU's or for indies shared gpu's where we could allow others to use our GPU when they are not busy and build up 'photon/ray credits' for when we need them (via our Unity account).

 

Aye, I'm not really sure what that pic is supposed to tell us.. It's either a lack of samples or it hasn't hit it's converge threshold yet.. You get these artifacts in just about every external lighting solution available when it hasn't finished its render..

 

Yeah... and while probably not appropriate for real-time usage, I would also have thought that if you're using it for a bake you could run some filter over it to clean it up with pretty good results. All of the "fireflies" there are smaller than a pixel in a typical light bake, and the desired results are mostly broad gradients which could eat up that kind of noise pretty easily.

I'm no expert there, though. Could be wrong.

 

If you looked at the first post you would see that is filtering just fine.

this comarison is not accurate

its looking very promising

 

I don't get it either. They are all unfinished/low setting renders apart from the UE one. The Beast one doesn't even look like GI was setup properly. Surely Beast wasn't that bad, but it was stuck in Gamma color space.

 

It doesn't really matter. The example images are captured from within the Octane viewport, not lightmaps. I think what most people care about on this thread is the fidelity of the resulting lightmaps and how to bake them.

 

Judging a screenshot by a photograph of a display is a bad idea.

 

I already worked too long time with most renderers. So all settings are in the best state. But i didn't had much free time to wait for reduce all noises.I speaking about GI maximum distance quality (Indirect Shadows) and not about noise
UE is better because used Tonemapping to fix its stuck near the light source
https://forum.unity.com/threads/pro...ghten-vs-lightmass.454229/page-3#post-3138865

 

Octane with tone mapper