[SOLVED]Is Otoy Octane rendering with photorealistic quality integrated within the Unity 5.6 or 5.7?

Otoy and Unity announced their collaboration to integrate Octane rendering within the Unity timeline. Unity 5 Pro users will be able to put the hands on this new super awesome product?

 

"Unity Technologies hasn’t announced a release date for the OctaneRender integration, beyond simply “next year”, but the demo showed it running inside an early build of Unity 5.6."
I don't expect to see OctaneRender in 5.6, but 100% it will be in "Unity 2017.x". I am not sure about "Unity 2017" beta that will be available in April 2017

 

Will we get an experimental, preview, alpha, etc? If so, any idea of when? I cannot be the only person in a company which has up-and-coming projects we are planning for, and would like to see if this will be a good fit BEFORE we hit a production schedule, and thus will need actually information sooner rather than later. Right now there seems to be next to no technical details released.

How are shaders going to interface with Octane? Do we need to use specific shaders, or will all shaders, or a limited set, be supported? Will Octane be able to use all textures plugged into the standard shader? What if we want to use a skin shader from something like Alloy, or an Uber shader will PoM, Beast for snow, an ocean shader, etc etc? What are the actual limitations on what we can use?

PS: For the record, very excited about this! Not trying to complain ... just hopeful that our company can actually use this for pre-rendered shots (along with the $$$ plugins I've already purchased).

 

We all die of the desire to know more. But probably the technology is not ready to so much powerful rendering in real-time. @DGordon We need to be patients. Probably 2017 product for rendering films or screenshots. I wish it as shadow baking solution.

 

In some commercial applications horsepower is a non-issue. Plus, parallelism on GPU's is starting to really push the bar way up.

 

All we need are non-realtime screen shots ... just using Octane to do pre-rendered images ... exactly what they are advertising it for.

I don't think asking for info about how shaders will interact with octane is not having patience ... I'm essentially asking if the thousands of dollars that I've already spent in Unity will work with their new feature, or if we'll have to (a) roll our own, (b) buy a new shader set, or (c) it will come included with other shaders.

[Edit] I'll add that I have no problem if they don't. What I'm curious about is if the workflow to get high-quality visuals will be easier, equal, or harder than using Octane in 3ds Max. Considering the shier amount of assets, dynamic generators, the new timeline, etc. at our disposal, if the shaders can be set up easily (ie: the way Unity currently works) this is going to be a massive game-changer for what small companies can produce.