I’ve seen the videos on Octane in Unity and was curious about more information on the application of it.
Does it require the scene to be static or baked/non-interactive?
Is it possible to use it realtime and with interactive scenes if given enough horsepower? Eg, make a game that uses it all the time.
How does this tie into the standard renderer workflow? Is it a scene-specific setting?
Do custom shaders work or is the Standard shader required on everything?
What are the prerequisites for using it? Are complex lighting setups from an external application required for it to render properly in Unity or can we just drop it in for auto-magic awesomeness?
Does it require the scene to be static or baked/non-interactive?
No dynamic scenes work . You can move Unity objects in Editor and it will update live in the Octane viewport. Octane currently has to bake vertex data every frame for character animation, but that will be fixed before release as we are adding bone/skinning into Octane 3.07 which will ship with Unity 2017.
Is it possible to use it realtime and with interactive scenes if given enough horsepower? Eg, make a game that uses it all the time.
it’s possible in Editor, but we will wait until Octane 4 before we encourage people publish games for local playback using path tracing. The concept with light field baking is you can still get real time perf. (even in VR/AR) + Octane quality using this system in place of traditional lightmapping over mesh data.
How does this tie into the standard renderer workflow? Is it a scene-specific setting?
If you enable Octane, you get an Octane render target for your scene, and it will pull in all Unity assets. If you drop in an ORBX package with lighting and more set up, then you can use that as your environment and mix Octane + Unity assets in the Octane viewport. Unity PBR shaders and assets map automatically into Octane, but any Octane imported elements have the full Octane shaders and tools exposed in Unity Editor. You can create a materiel map override for a Unity object and give it an Octane material, but then the Unity viewport will go to baked OR lighting or blank material in the rasterized viewport.
Do custom shaders work or is the Standard shader required on everything?
Standard shaders for now, but anything will be possible in 3.1 with OSL, which can translate arbitrary shader input.
What are the prerequisites for using it? Are complex lighting setups from an external application required for it to render properly in Unity or can we just drop it in for auto-magic awesomeness?
If you drop your Unity scene into a great octane environment (even daylight system), it will look great too.
Just PLEASE implement realtime rendering in the future. It’s not far from now when PC’s will be able to use realtime pathtracing in games. I really hope that you will stick to the plan on bringing it with Octane 4.
How do I get part of this alpha?? Lol so excited for this stuff making ton of vr/mr experiences would love to test it out and prep when you finally make it realtime with interactive elements
I’m waiting for Octane / Unity to take VR filmmaking up a notch.
I managed to get this scene running on an S6edge/ gearVR (and recording on the S6phone simultaneously. All assets are from the asset store). I think if rendered with Octane, this would be truly Cinematic VR, indistinguishable from a live action set
How do I get to be on the alpha test list? Would love to talk about this at Film Festivals I speak at.
I might be incorrect here, but I don’t think that anything from Intel (besides maybe Xeon Phi) is fast enough to compete with the current line up of Nvidia cards within Octane. Otoy has also announced that they’re working with PowerVR to speed up ray tracing as well, but not much more beyond that has been said.
Having said that, I can’t wait to get my hands on the integration of Octane within Unity. It’s a huge deal in terms of content creation pipelines.
@PikleJoos yeah Intel with octane would be amazing in Unity, it would make it broader than just NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards. @OTOY from that picture of Intel WIP, is it possible or wouldn’t be much a problem If it worked in unity?
My Nvidia cards are ready so I’m not dependent on Intel . I do like the idea of Octane working on Intel and AMD though, because it means that more people would be able to use it. I’m not sure if a lot of people here are interested in video, but I find this very interesting and it involves Unity/Octane as well:
making ton of vr/mr experiences would love to test it out and prep when you finally make it realtime with interactive elements
