After reviewing Octane Render we decided to make an interview with OTOY to get known the company which stays behind the development of the renderer and as well ask some questions about the renderer itself. OTOY took over the development of Octane Render from a New Zealand company called Refractive Software and continued the development on it, bringing new features and enhancement to the renderer. Moreover, Octane Render is the world's first GPU based, un-biased, physically based renderer. And from my opinion is worth to try. We were asking questions Sam Lapere, product manager for Octane Render at OTOY New Zealand and we would like to thank him one more time for taking the time for answering our questions.
Check also the video at the bottom in which are presented works did with Octane Render by Erik Jansson.
Q: Can you tell us something about the history of OTOY?
OTOY was founded by Jules Urbach, Alissa Grainger and Malcolm Taylor in 2009 and has two main focuses: delivering remote services on the cloud like server side rendering, streaming games and 3D content creation apps and the LightStage, which is an extremely high quality capturing environment able to make 100% photorealistic representations of actors.
Q: OTOY is focused mainly on cloud Technologies. What was the reason to take over the development of Octane Render?
OTOY has experience with building clusters of GPUs and server side rendering for games. Octane Render had piqued our interest early in its beta development phase because of its speed, quality and ease of use, but it required a high end GPU to fully appreciate its power. We want to democratize Octane Render so everyone can enjoy very fast photorealistic 3D rendering on any device, even iPads, without having to worry about the GPU or CPU they have inside.
Q: Octane Render is the first unbiased renderer purely based on the GPU. Why did you choose this approach? Why not a hybrid CPU-GPU?
Using the CPU in hybrid rendering mode does not provide much benefit unless you have a very powerful one. Hybrid rendering means that CPU rendering must be synchronized with GPU rendering which is almost always less efficient than pure GPU rendering, because the GPU has to wait for the CPU and starts idling. Our goal is to have the fastest renderer on the market, so we focus all our efforts and developer resources on the GPU. It's also much easier and more effective use of resources to concentrate on one platform only.
Q: What are the advantages of Octane Render comparing to other renderers on the market?
Octane Render's main advantages are its speed, rendering quality and ease of use: Octane is the fastest renderer on the market, it's also easy and fast to set up your scene, camera, lights and materials interactively and thanks to the progressive rendering you get an immediate preview of the final quality image.
Q: Comparing the price of Octane Render among other renderers the price is very low. What were the reasons to set the price so low.
Good point. Even though Octane competes with renderers that cost ten times as much, we decided to keep the price very low because we want Octane Render to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. We target not only 3D professionals like architects and product designers, but also freelancers and hobbyists.
Q: Where can be Octane Render mostly used? (Visualizations, Architecture, VFX …)
Octane can be used for everything 3D related: special effects for films, 3D animation, TV commercials, 3D stills, architecture, product design and automotive visualization.
Q: If we compare some Intel i7 CPU which has 4 cores and 8 threads to a Nvidia GPU which can have hundreds of CUDA cores does this means that the performance is rising linearly with the number of cores? Is there any correlation between the CPU cores and GPU cores?
There is no correlation between CPU and GPU cores. GPU cores are designed to be smaller and simpler then Cpu cores so you can fit more of them on one board. Also, GPU core counts cannot easily be compared accros GPU generations, for example a high end Kepler GPU like the GTX 680 has about 3x as much cores as the GTX 580 which is based on Fermi, but each of the Kepler cores is a lot less powerful than a Fermi core, which makes Kepler about as fast as Fermi. Nevertheless, Octane Render scales extremely well with the number of GPUs and the number of cores per GPU, for example, when using 8 GPUs, we observe a speedup of 7.92x.