What's the point of Octane Renderer's Unity integration?

https://unity3d.com/partners/otoy/octane

I'm having trouble understanding what are the possible use cases for Octane Renderer in Unity. Any ideas?

You could maybe pre-render some item UI thumbnails in an inventory, or little things like that... but am I missing something? Otherwise if you want to make actual pre-rendered cinematics, seems to me like Unity wouldn't be the best toolset for that

Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there actually are tons of things you can do with it, but the page fails to give us any clear example of what this is for, aside from the typical sort of pre-rendering that would be much better to do in software other than Unity. It just remains extremely vague and carefully avoids mentioning that Octane is for pre-rendered stuff, so it's setting people up for disappointment

 

This shows that you can bake an image of a scene.... but then what do you do with that?
It's not like you can then move your camera around in the baked scene; it's just an image

 

Its too slow to be realtime... path tracing and 'pmc' or whatever... it's for generating very high quality images, generating videos, 360 videos I presume, and movies or clips etc for playback. Higher quality lighting and stuff than the normal pipeline, but inherently slower. But if you're into making films or whatever, it could give a really nice edge of quality.

 

Currently the application is essentially offline rendering. Future scope includes doing the same thing realtime and some other niche applications. Several years away.

Pointless? I don't think so. While I have no use for offline rendering there are applications in film for this and great potential for better realtime rendering in the future.

 

Looks like something I would try to use for cut scene videos, or still images I might display of a level while it loads. A reason to have this in Unity instead of doing this in another tool would be that all your assets/characters are already built and scaled in Unity, so would probably be a time saver to built your still image or cut scene in Unity vs importing all those assets and controlling them in another application.

I haven't looked into using this. Just my first impression.

 

You can make games with ultra high-quality pre-rendered backgrounds, both static and dynamic:

 

What's wrong with V-ray / lux etc / Blender cycles etc.? You already have to create artwork / animations in a DCC and tieing it together with some .mel / python isn't that difficult especially because there's a boat load of scripts already available for this kind of thing.

Also there's tons of advanced vfx options / physics etc. you wouldn't get in Unity.. To me where it could be very useful is a lightmapper if they're thinking about doing it? As much as I think Unity's lightmappers are "ok" Lightmass shows how good they can really look..

 

A unified workflow is the first (only?) thing that comes to mind. Unity makes it trivially easy to get good camera results and cutscene editing with cinemachine and timeline compared to tools like Blender. Plus you don't end up having to divvy up your tools to get the same results.

 

Well, in case of blender cycles, blender for a long time didn't have a proper PBR shader. Standard cycles nodes had no metallic component.

Aaand now thanks to your post I found that situation will change in 2.79 that isn't released yet with :-\.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/nodes/types/shaders/principled.html

 

Where the FRAKING FRAK I can learn more about light field rendering? I don't get any of that!

 

Wow. After all this years, we finally have a tool to make games with ultra high-quality pre-rendered backgrounds, both static and dynamic. Wow

 

Will you be able to let the end-user render out images with octane?
Out project needs a render output for the user.
So far it looks like octane can only be used in the Unity Editor.

 

It's worth noting with modern hardware, you would have the (animated) pre rendered background and have it received dynamic light too (bake the material and normal to a texture t find the composite lighting) + intersect geometry (bake the depth map).

When I was working in the industry, my team did something like that to hide load and unloading during in game cinematic, they had the background baked to a texture to unload the geometry, have the characters play their part and "seamlessy" transition back to real time with new asset loading.

 

You can get a build here, they're quite stable at this point.

 

While this does not seem very useful for gamedev (yet) it is however extremely useful for things like previs, archvis, lookdev etc. especially if you have unity already in your pipeline.

 

A render available in build for the end user would be an extremely cool feature.

But for editor only, I would have to agree with OP, it would have very few use cases where it would be applicable.

 

Okay... I see potential in there. If I understand correctly, you could use this to bake "animated backgrounds/skyboxes". Kinda like Dark Souls does


It's based on the actual game level that you'd have in Unity, but when seen from far-away, it's pre-rendered. So in this case, having the ability to do that in Unity is an advantage, because you already have your scene all set up

And it even seems like it allows for some level of dynamism with lighting if you bake it correctly. We definitely need some learning resources on all that, with a real-world example like the animated background above.

But in practice, I have my doubts about the reusability of an in-game scene for baking stuff like that. You need octane-specific materials applied on everything if you want good quality, and possibly different asset meshes, additional FX, etc... You might just end up recreating another scene entirely just for the pre-render, just as you would do in max/maya/blender. Stuff like those clouds and light shafts would be much easier to create in 3D modeling/animation software

 

I think I'll wait till it makes into stable steam release - it shouldn't take too long at this point. I switched from manual release installation to steam version of blender some time ago.

I suspect those are particle systems and traditional vfx.
PRerendering animated skybox will lock you into certain framerate - the one at which the skybox was rendered.

 

makes sense. I didn't think about that.
Unless maybe they render it at 144 fps and then the game's framerate will be the natural bottleneck? I dunno how much of a performance impact this would have

 

I highly doubt it. Higher framerate would require higher bitrate, and 144 is not a good framerate, because it can't be divided by 30 or 60 (other target framerates).

 

Why?

Where? I don't see no download link.

Weird how Unity is getting tools that all deal with final presentation (yknow cinamatics, rendering, etc)... yet no tools or improvements that really help users actually make content in the editor quicker, easier and better.

 

No it would not, the created sequence can be displayed at any framerate similar to a normal frame by frame animation. playing a video however would have constraints you mention.

For now I am struggling to see the use of this outside creating highly detailed frame by frame animations to use similarly to billboards to increase visual quality with very little to no performance decrease.

360 video is another good use I guess.

 

In this release:
1) cinematic rendering in editor for VR
2) ORBX import/export to 25 DCC tools with all PBR lighting and scene data

In the next releases:

3) GPU path traced baking - many times faster and better than progresslive light mapper and enlighten

4) light field and surface light field baking

+Next year:

Octane 4 /w brigade for dynamic path tracing + AI denosier in game mode

 

Ah! That sounds really interesting!

I wasn't familiar with Brigade. So it's a full-featured realtime rendering engine that's way better than anything else on the market? Can it be used to replace Unity's renderer entirely? What's the catch?

 

Now things are getting interesting ..

 

Because it handles auto-updating automatically (major factor). Also because it has app usage timer (minor reason).

I've been babysitting blender installation manually since version 2.5, and around 2.75 I decided that I shouldn't be doing that. Switched to steam version. Has been happy with my decision so far.

To have smooth motion, number of frames used by squence should be divisible by number of frames used to render scene in your game. At high framerates it would be less noticeable, of course, but chances are you'll need to lock framerate at either 30 or 60 fps.

Anyway, I think offline renderer is cool, and could be used, for example to render some sort of procedural or user-generated objects offline.

 

Even when the framerate is "locked", it's always a little bit volatile. For example, the real framerates you'd get when locking at 60 would be between 55 and 65. So it's never really possible to render perfectly in sync with a video

 

Actually, you're wrong here. It is possible to render perfectly in sync with a video.

You can bind framerate to vsync, and then it'll be pretty stable 60 or 30 fps, as long as the system can keep up with display refresh rate.

Also see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down

 

So nobody know what all this light field thing is (at technical level)?

 

https://home.otoy.com/render/light-fields/
https://home.otoy.com/render/light-fields/showcase/

 

THat's market speech level, not technical, it doesn't tell me what's stored, proces and rendered, my early guess is that they have a tight array of pre rendered cubemap interpolated together (which allow reconstruction of finer details and different view dependent effects), but that wouldn't account for for the possibility of having focus control, unless they store a depthmap on each cubemap.

Lytro camera works with array of flat pictures reconstructed for a small view points, this looks like the cubemap extention of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro

But I can think of artefacts with that they don't have (mostly view dependent stuff like specular reflection), so I'm likely flat out wrong.

 

What are the shortcomings in Octane for Unity compared to the retail version of Octane?

In other words, what prevents all your current customers from stop paying you and instead using the free integrated Octane renderer in Unity instead?

 

Rendering with just one GPU can take a VERY long time.

 

One of the references on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field) links to Stanford University.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/lightfield/
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/light/

Some of the other references have papers too but this one is available for free and seems to be the most applicable.

 

One point would be to render your cinematics right in Unity with the assets you already got. At least you can render better game teasers or game story videos that way. Especially for those who don't own or know how to use expensive 3D rendering software. Or simply render Wallpapers or so.

Another point that I can see is the usage of scripting that often is an issue with offline renderers. They may do great simulations and animations but sometimes scripting can be very helpful and this is certainly much easier with Unity.
But that only is true if we even can render a runtime play in Unity frame by frame with Octane.

For now I don't see any usage for it. At my work we use Octane and Cinema4D for offline rendering but see no usage of Unity here. The only thing I am waiting for is the Octane powered Lightmapper.

 

When can we have fully baked real-time environments such as forests, tropical beaches and anything environment game ready related using unity's shadows upfront and baked in shadows and GI in the back so we get that seamless integration from real-time to baked all around. I mean what's the point of having this amazing renderer if we can't actually use it for realtime running environments eventually.

 

Support for realtime pathtracing during runtime is scheduled for Octane 4.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/oct...-seconds-not-hours.499751/page-2#post-3261908

 

Well see what they come up for examples in the future but the for fun stuff with a simple building is all great and all to show off simple uses but talking about getting down and dirty with real enviro's to Oh and Ah the masses

 

It can also be used for in game maps. We use a normal Unity camera for this now, but I guess it could look prettier with Octane?

 

i definitly will use unity3d as soon as possible as my main CG application for rendering anyway. love the fact that the GPU renderer is inside unity.
the other main Reason why i love it is the use of lightfields in VR.
I'am still searching for tutorials to get into it.