Octane Lightmapping in Unity takes seconds, not hours

@OTOY

Is there any chance you could make it possible to blend lightmaps? That would give Octane one serious advantage over Enlighten, the ability to sample at multiple points and then blend with it when using something like a time of day system. When it comes to lightmap cache, potentially a system that could do variable quality via bounding box ala Lightmass?

In games short distance shadow maps are going to be covered by realtime cascades anyway so I think you could get away with it..

Just a passing thought.

 

Yes - now that 3.08 is out, we are going to leverage the OSL camera for much more complex baking and irradiance workflows that can drive the path trace rays any way you like. We are working with Unity on improving the baking process and looking at directional light map baking as well. Note - that both textures and the baked maps can be stored in CPU memory, without Octane slowing down (maybe 10% speed hit on CPU textures). We only require unique geometry in VRAM to render. Note that Octane scales linearly with GPU cores and GPU count. a GTX 960 is only 50 OctaneBench, if baking is a time consuming task for your scenes, newer GPUs can do many times faster. The laptop used showing the baking tests has 256 OctaneBench. (https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?sort_by=avg&singleGPU=1)

We are working very hard on advancing AMD GPU support, it is still in beta, and Windows only, but MacOS is very high priority on the roadmap

 

this is really great news! thanks for the update

macbook pro 2016 user, i7 quad core 2.7 hgz
16 gb ram
and amd radeon pro 460 card with 4gb ram, I guess thats not much, but thats all that apple had last year, I can add an external gpu such as titan xp with a lot of ram on the gpu.

would that be a good enough system?

 

I found my answer : https://bizon-tech.com/us/bizonbox2s_benchmarks

 

There will be an Octane Render option in the drop-down menu in the Light window, Scene tab > Lightmapping Settings?

Hope for a nice future with good colour workflow between Substance>Unity>Otoy.

 

i started to use octane in its infant beta times (waaaaay before OTOY purchase) and i can clearly tell you this renderer will change everything in Unity.

When everything works as they mention.. sky is the limit. Once you render or bake something with Octane there is no turning back. When you have money just upgrade your GPU bam! you are X times faster..

And be aware there are different kernels built in for Octane. You can use PMC, PathTracing, Direct AO, Direct Diffuse... For many scenes you can get away with Direct Diffuse or Direct AO and it is really beautiful.

and it is free for 1 gpu. This is so awesome !
Thank you OTOY!

 

Without lightmapping, nothing will be important
Rove3D can render very high quality CG styles with fast render time with very easy workflow.
But unity don't needs offline renderer .Most unity customers are game developers and need Lightmapping

Octane lightmapping quality and render time is good, but using GPU ? GPU always make system too slow during bake with very limitation on multiple model rendering in a same time , But cpu can handle everything (i compared most renderes and lightmappers, VRay can show you different between CPU and GPU in a same time ) .CPU looks 10~100x faster than GPU in vray with less noise

 

Ok i hear what you say. When i start using octane i used another video card -slower one- for UI and rest of the system... So you can solve all your problems - I believe you can select which GPU you want to use with Octane for Unity.

By the way do you have VRAY for Unity? No .. sorry but VRAY missed a huge opportunity here. OTOY's aggressive expansion hopefully will continue.

Also in your logic... it is faster to lightmap baking within VRAY and put that lightmap data back to Unity?? wait it is not over yet.. you add lets say a game object? holyhell - that object is NOT in MAX so .. what is your point?

Please do not make what you are making in SEGI thread - and comparing irrelevant things. Creating confusion across the board.

Here amazingly you mentioned VRAY in Octane for Unity thread. That is heresy!

 

I love all renderers and my work is all about comparisons.
i don't want to people wast their time whitout get currect result.
I've been waiting for Octane like many people for months But after months we heard that there was no lightmapping
I talked about VRay to compare CPU and GPU in a same time in a same machine. CPU was faster in baking and usable in large environments.

Do not you want to know which one is better? Do you want to waste your time and money like me?

VRay:
- Is not free
- Fastest renderer in the world in action with proper settings
- CPU and GPU in a same time for Cuda or OpenCL
- Maya,Max,Blender ...
- Very easy
- Has a lot of tutorials
- Can bake everything (Normal,AO,Reflections,GI ...)
- VRay RT for realtime rendering in Maya viewport
- Distribute rendering
- Has trial version for test and learning (+ Maya and max student versions)

Octane:
- Diffuse GI mode is very fast
- Inside unity workflow (With mistakes in login)
- It's free for single users

Progressive Lightmapper:
- It's free
- I's compatible with everything in Unity lighting workflow (Light settings,light probes, lighting modes ....)
- Very fast with proper settings (using 180 spot lights and indirect lights)
- Automatic workflow

Also i love POLM gpu baker because:
- Open source
- Access to its developer in here
- Low price

So the best choice currently is PLM for games and VRay for Interior scenes (Assigning lightmap file is very simple because Vray has Batch lightmapping mode)

Also you can use Octane for Baking like Vray as external lightmap baker with a bit more manually workflow

Don't forget Octane lightmapper had light leaks but VRay is bug free from this side
This is my comparisons and experiences in 11/17/2017
After updating each renderer, i can test them more and share the results

1. SEGI was open source. So you can use it or not without money without affecting the author's marketing
2. Here is not official thread for Octane. Title is about Fast baking solution
3. Octane is free for using or testing

 

When I was testing lightmapping with cycles GPU, interior scenes were nightmares. Unless I'm missing something I believe octane must be using a similar lightmapping algo, so I wouldn't imagine any improvements there.

With lightmapping the whole point is having a great uv unwrapped models which are optimised, this takes a S*** tonne of work anyway, which cannot be avoided.

With Vray, although I've never used it, it is clear it is a contender for faster more polished lightmapping especially with interiors - to say it is easy to use is somewhat a misnomer, you need to be familiar with all the settings, with an unbiased renderer like cycles/octane you just hit the render button and you're good to go. Mixed mode lighting would still be an issue though, vray is closed proprietary source anyway so chances it making it to a game engine for free is highly unlikely. Vray on the GPU would seriously interest me if it was free.

Testing with PLM the GI definitely looks better than englighten, although it is still noisier and doesn't clear as fast, implying long bake times. Englighten also appears to be unpredicatable, change a setting here and there and sometimes the scene geometry bakes with weird black splotches sometimes it doesn't. Even so, enlighten is still the quickest and less noisy in all my tests.

I always thought unreal engine was doing something miraculous with the baking but look at the test scenes and they are typically hours to render, still way too long for my liking.

At some point, I just downright gave up on the whole baking thing anyway.

The whole point of games is a seamless integration of moving objects within the scene.

Highly realistic baked scenes are absolutely terrible to integrate with realtime moving characters and objects.

This is where engines like cryengine might shine, but then you need a decent gpu etc (I'm on a mac mini heh)

Personally, I still think this problem is a difficult one to solve, I don't feel octane is the miracle solution IMO

 

Thank you for your comment

some notes:
VRay is not too hard. Just needs few clicks to get the best result(Octane needs samething too) . Default Automatic unwarping works fine in Vray. VRay automatically fix all lightmapping issues (It's miracle) .I couldn't find a proper settings in Octane fro light leaks or black holes in corners

Indirect lights always has Noise issue. SO in UE you can see spot lights as Indirect light simulator in all tutorials. So with same setup in PLM, we can get faster result (10 hour => 1 hour)

Currently the only seamless integration is PLM

 

I read there was way more settings inside vray as it is a biased renderer as opposed to an unbiased render like octane or cycles but as you've had experience using it I'll have to take your opinion on that. Either way, because vray is biased it should perform lightmapping way faster than octane even though octane is GPU based.

I believe this is basically due to the algorithms it is using. I guess this is why even though englighten isn't as pretty as PLM it still clears way faster.

 

Anyway, this might be offtopic (so to speak) but my issue with ultra realistic baked game scenes is the integration with moving objects and game play.

It's just too difficult to get right, and the iterative workflow is totally insane and tedious IMO. I wanna make enjoyable games to play. I don't want to spend hours trying to make sure when the chair falls over it looks realistic within the rest of the scene.

^^ Take a look at this, the uncanny valley effect is in play. The characters look totally superimposed, when the rest of the scene is realistic.

 

UE has very good Auto Exposure and color balance settings

Character lighting is Lightprobes or Proxy lightprobes.It's simple

90+% are image effects in UE

Also Corona is available for quick result from VRay developers focused on ArchViz interior

 

thanks for your post Ali. You do not want people to waste time but you are bringing VRAY like it is a contender. Sorry mate. VRAY missed Unity train.

But i encourage your testing between current lightmapping solutions - enlighten PLM Octane.

For how long you ve been using Octane? What is your GPU? do you have single GPU? Did you use other Kernels? PMC and Directlight Diffuse.. for example. Are you sure you really spend a good time with stand alone or any other plugin version of Octane

And please do note that, after super promising `denoiser` update things will be totally insane.

 

I don't know what you mean to say here, but what I was implying the combination of baked and realtime character look bad IMO, not great LOL. Now with cryengine that issue would be solved, but then everything is realtime graphic card intensive. . . with it comes a whole heap of other problems.

Additionally, @tyrot you're coming across as irritating, yes this is an octane thread and not vray but it is helpful to discuss the other alternatives out there especially as vray will still out perform octane on scenes such as interiors with massive geometry, even on the CPU, this has been proven due to the nature of the algorithm it uses.

Also unreal engine is planning to integrate vray if that includes lightmapping I don't know but one can assume it eventually will so . . .

 

no mate .. All i say for UNITY there is no built-in VRAY solution .. So there are millions of renderers out there we can bake couple of box in a room and export that lightmap into Unity but is it what we talking here?

Right now Enlighten PLM and Octane .. right ? Compare those till your GPU melt i am ok with it..

 

I used medium GTX960 2GB GPU to get an acceptable result with most people's GPUs (most people has laptops)

I tested long time Beast,Enlighten,PLM,VRay,Octane,Rove3D,Mental Ray,Arnold, POLM and Turtle. From technical side all are same (beast and turtle is old in GI quality ) . But differences are in :
- Bake time
- Workflow (integration)
- Price

Octane's bake time : Is good in multiple high end gpus
Workflow for lightmapping is not usable currently (manually create render textures and assign them. Only bakes diffuse map and not lightmap only element) .Only can bake one texture in a same time and in a same PBR Component
Price is free

I already talked about bake time in Path Tracer,or Diffuse kernels. Quality looks same but render time is faster in Diffuse GI mode .

 

Okayyyyy. Whatever you're ok with. Right.

Anyway, for those interested. For interior scenes/open scenes requiring high quality baked lightmaps go ahead and do a comparison with an unbiased render (even with GPU assistance) and a biased one and tell me what your conclusions are. I personally feel it is an appropriate question to ask as this is what we're talking about here -lightmaps for game dev. I see there being an issue with the lighting algorithm used and as that is at the core of octane's technology and they are planning to utilise it for game dev it is a highly relevant question IMO.

 

Octane only supports Texture baking. So you must assighn manually and re create manually render textures for each mesh.

VRay can bake in batch mode automatically. So you can set your lightmapping folder from your unity project for Vray lightmap path to override lightmapps automatically. In this case you can bake your scene only with 1 click in Maya or Max (i tested Maya)

Other renderes (Arnold) doesn't support Lightmapping

You are speaking with an expert lighting user (3 years lighting experience). I tested everything in action

 

Legally or illegally heh, all those lighting engines don't come cheap!

 

Most has trial versions
I only purchased Maya LT for commercial use
Maya student version
Vray trial
Beast free
Turtle from maya LT
Polm as beta tester
Octane Free
Enlighten and PLM free
Rove3D free

And more ?

I'm not crazy to buy renderers for only test and learn purpose

My long experience is only on Unity lightmappers
My Vray and other renderers experience is based on my deep experience on Lightmapping logic. All are same with different workflow

I learned VRay in a few days because i know everything about lighting workflow (with my experienced Vray friend guides)

 

Well as someone who participated in the Render the Metaverse contest with hundreds of hours in Octane Render outside of Unity, this thread is kind of difficult to read through.

Octane uses it's own internal material system. Custom shaders need to be rewritten in OSL. Particles need to be simulated using volumetrics in .vdb format. The Unity integration is not about simply flipping a dropdown switch and baking out lightmaps in currently developed games. Maybe that will happen, yet not for awhile.

What this is really about, at least from my vantage point, is enabling Unity through Cinemachine and Timeline into a Hollywood quality interactive cinematic VR production studio for 360 stereographic films, rendered one frame at a time, and played back through ORBX compatible media players; and then eventually rendering interactive lightfields and streaming them to users over the internet, most likely through the Facebook Oculus platform.

 

I think he is mighty fine here, his comparison is sensible:

- he is using is own hardware
- with similar scenes and assets he set up himself
- with precise use case (like bounce quality)
- entirely on his own skills

Those are comparable data.

He might be bold on the interpretation of those data, but this will inevitably vary per person, and is down to three parameters: quality, cost and workflow. Which we can all judge for ourselves with available data and the comparison.

Back in SEGI interpretations and data were mixed, leading to difficult comparison.

 

So octane's integration is about cinemachine and timeline. What do you mean like cut scenes?

 

Not exactly, in the tradtional sense of cutscenes. More like what Pixar does with Renderman, where they render out individual frames for the film at 24 fps. Except in this case, each frame is a pair of cubemaps, rather than a 16:9 window, one for each eye position, rendered at 60fps and 90fps, at least for targeting current VR hardware. Oculus intends to target 240fps within the next decade.

All of Hollywood's tools are designed around a 2D workflow. Unity appears to be trying to position itself as the next professional tool for 3D immersive cinematic experiences - it was one of the key themes at Unite this year. Where they lack is in the rendering department, hence Octane.

 

It has clearly been stated by Otoy that a realtime solution by baking lightmap is coming. Not just offline renderer alike for video making. To me the liightmaping thing is the game changer.
I have a 1080 and cant wait to put it to work lightmaping complex scenes and see if it delivers.

 

Sure, totally. Yet from my understanding, Octane rendered lightmaps will require using Octane as the renderer, which means one will still have to convert their materials to Octane's internal format for highest fidelity and then either place them within an unlit shader or create a custom shader in OSL format; then convert all of their game's custom shaders into OSL format as well; and then remake all of their particles into volumetric vdb format (which can have a performance hit), at least until they support Unity's particle system.

Jules can correct me if I'm wrong, yet this is not going to be a simple dropdown switch inside the Lighting settings window, where one can quickly switch between options and rebake. It's more involved than that.

 

akshara .. you are coming up with very interesting questions..

Can we use Unity like unified rendering center in near future ?

I mean, instead of rendering with Max, Maya, LW, C4D can we export all of our models using FBX- with materials (converted from Octane's own material shaders into Unity's standard shader) and Render with Timeline/Cinemachine?

Render out with Octane's gazillions of passes?

Using Octane's instancing power?

A new type of game engine + renderer software... who knows?

 

Im pretty sure tis will be suporting standard shader out of the box and lightmaping will be like with Beast. Any conversion should be done behind scenes IMO.

 

Hopefully so, that would be very cool. Currently the standard shader is supported, yet has lower quality than the PBRoverride shader and requires manual placement of the resultant diffuse material into an unlit shader.

 

SO i need to make anew comparison between VRay,PLM ,POLM, and Octane:
Quality,Bake Time

POLM will be used to see how much octane is faster or slower because POLM is native renderer on GPU

 

Not really, because we all know trying to convincingly mix baked and real time lighting in games, whilst a cute idea, never works in practice. . . Kinda like communism

 

You do that, I'm pretty sure I'll stick with Otoy OR GPU-progressive (Unity).

Seems to work fantastic in my game. I just want shorter baking times. I'm not interested in visuals which look different to realtime lighting as I use enlighten for GI.

 

Ali, can you possibly make your own thread for this? this thread is actually about Octane lightmapping, specifically. I'm sure you understand?

 

Yes I will make it now and remove this one

 

So, I might sound like an idiot, but what is actually available now, versus planned, with Octane? Is this only for rendering offline cinematics? That has been my impression. Can I do lightmap baking with it, or will I be able to? People talk about that in here, but it's really unclear what is planned versus what is here. The Otoy site mentions that coming in 2017.2, which has been out for a while now.

What's the real use case for this?

 

So far for what I've read in this thread. It will/does support lightmap baking but has a big limiattion that requires that all objects to be lightmaped be a single mesh, obviously this is kind of beta stage, at least in regards to lightmaping. I've seen unity posts with octane doing offline rendering. But in regards to lightmaps the thing seems unfinished yet. I'm eagerly waiting too.

 

For all intents and purposes, lightmap baking is not ready, i.e. there is no official support for a lightmap baking workflow that is suitable for production. There is a way to render to texture and use those as lightmaps, but I believe there are several limitations with this method.

 

If we can render to texture without overwriting original then this is great. I've always wanted this feature and I think its better this way. no need to use up texture memory on lightmaps, also you the lighting resolution will be equal to the objects texture size. Am I the only one that prefers render to texture over a separate lightmap?
what are the negatives to render to texture?

 

Manually create a new PBR Render Target for each object and create another Render Texture (Lightmap texture) for each one and press render button
Then manually convert render textures into actual textures and assign them into each material manually

 

Thanks for taking the time to explain, but that seems way too tedious. I'm hoping that this asset will have simpler solution in the future.

 

Thanks for the explanations!

 

Hi all! Sorry for the belated reply, just catching up on these posts now!

We've been heads down here on the next release of Octane for Unity, which should be out before the holidays.

While you can manually experiment with GPU baking now, I am in full agreement that we need to handle baking automatically and seamlessly, so it's as easy to use and integrate as PLM, et al . With some help from our friends at Unity, we are working on getting this properly implemented early next year.

This month's update is a necessary foundation for that to happen. It includes many improvements in the material and scene converter, as well as ORC support (which can offload any job from unity - including baking - onto 1000's of GPUs on the cloud). Most importantly - game mode is now fully working. I can play tanks and the other Unity tutorials live in the Octane viewport with this week's build, which is pretty cool

The above is an important milestone ahead of Brigade integration (+ real time optimized AI denoiser + game mode kernels) coming to Octane 4 next year. GPU light field/ reflectance field baking will also be much more efficient in Octane 4.

 

Wow that's a big news, congratulations @OTOY Keep up the great job.

 

Good work, and may I ask for mac support with nvidia cards?
I have a mac with a 1080 ti with nvidia webdrivers, and it suppors cuda. with the nvidia cuda drivers.
Don't see why it should not be able to work with this config.

Spoiler: Octane bench results Mac

Octane version:
3.06.2

Operating system:
Mac OS X 10.13.1 64-bit

Devices:
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, 11 GB

Used lower parallel samples:
no

Total score:
188.154613


Scene, Kernel, Ms/s, GTX980 Ms/s, Ratio, Weight, Score
Interior (by Julia Lynen), info channels, 91.899738, 51.52, 1.784, 10, 4.459421
Interior (by Julia Lynen), direct lighting, 33.305498, 17.80, 1.871, 40, 18.710954
Interior (by Julia Lynen), path tracing, 15.786489, 8.54, 1.849, 50, 23.106687
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño), info channels, 174.281889, 85.99, 2.027, 10, 5.066923
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño), direct lighting, 39.266729, 21.05, 1.865, 40, 18.654028
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño), path tracing, 36.832462, 19.38, 1.901, 50, 23.756748
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev), info channels, 60.815755, 31.39, 1.937, 10, 4.843561
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev), direct lighting, 28.430782, 15.21, 1.869, 40, 18.692165
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev), path tracing, 24.064091, 12.92, 1.863, 50, 23.281822
Box (by Enrico Cerica), info channels, 134.986757, 65.75, 2.053, 10, 5.132576
Box (by Enrico Cerica), direct lighting, 26.013673, 13.84, 1.880, 40, 18.796007
Box (by Enrico Cerica), path tracing, 25.451405, 13.45, 1.892, 50, 23.653722

 

I feel kind of stupid, but I think that the goals for Octane with Unity are not being really expressed clearly any place that I've found. I've only looked casually, but I've looked multiple times and never come up with answers that made full sense to me. So, a few questions with that in mind:

1. Why would I want to have Octane inside unity right now?

My understanding: Right now it is a way to render hugely awesome-looking offline cinematics with really great GI and other effects. The idea being kind of like switching between iray and vray or other renderers for the same content in 3ds Max and other renderers. Is that right?

2. Why would I want to have Octane doing "realtime" work based on the workflow you describe above?

My understanding: It sounds kind of like you're moving towards having a rendering-pipeline replacement for unity's normal lighting and shadows and gi system? Or at least a partial one, kind of like Valve's "The Lab Renderer." Is this the case, and is this compatible with OSX and Linux as well as Windows?

3. How do we get something running in Octane instead of the default Unity style?

My understanding: We have to redo all our existing shaders in a new shader language, for which there may or may not be a converter. How this affects lights and shadows and lightmaps and reflection probes I don't yet understand. Obviously the mesh data itself would be identical.

4. If I just want to use Octane as a lightmap-baker for Unity's normal lights and shaders and so on, is that going to be possible?

My understanding: This is what a lot of us are hoping for most of all, because it will maintain the maximum of compatibility with unity as it evolves, but give us a big performance boost on creating quality lightmaps, as well as likely better results in the lightmaps themselves. That said, I think the answer to this question is "no, you're going to have to switch fully to Octane for any theoretical future lightmapping from Octane to function." Is that correct?

Basically a lot of us used to bake lightmaps externally in Max for faster creation times and better results in the end, but now that's harder than ever, and Octane looks like it's well positioned to replace that whole concept with "render your lightmaps with Octane instead of using Enlighten or the Progressive Lightmapper" for extra awesome.

 

point 4 is clearly answered here:
While you can manually experiment with GPU baking now, I am in full agreement that we need to handle baking automatically and seamlessly, so it's as easy to use and integrate as PLM, et al . With some help from our friends at Unity, we are working on getting this properly implemented early next year.

point1 yes, someone may find it usefull.

 

Got it -- I still wasn't sure if the baking would require switching to their shaders, though.

 

I was reading somewhere else that Octane cannot lightmap large scenes with lots of objects, only simple scenes with a couple of objects. Is this true?