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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
