Faster render settings?

[kobaltkween]

Blender 2.8 Eevee has pretty good real-time rendering. Unity and Unreal both have some pretty awesome trailers out that were done in real-time. Not sure what you're doing, but if speed is your absolute top priority and you're not doing anything insanely tricky, I'd definitely look into real time rendering.

PBRs are designed for real-time renderers. They're not actually an improvement for regular renderers, especially unbiased ones like Octane or Luxrender, just a standardization. Hence their support by Firefly and Superfly, despite Superfly being Cycles before PBR support was built in by the Blender Foundation and Firefly not getting any major new functionality render-wise (like caustics, for instance) beyond area lamps. The whole point of the shift to PBR was to make creating content for game-play easier.

Technically, it should be fairly easy to port content from one PBR system to another, since that was why the PBR system was created in the first place.

 

[Ken1171]

Just wanted to mention that real-time PBR is not full PBR, but a simplification of it. It doesn't support a number of native PBR features, especially the ones that require slow raytracing, like caustics and multi-object self-reflections. Real-time PBR only supports reflecting the environment (if any) on the objects. They cannot reflect each other. That would require offline raytracing.

Also, it is not accurate to claim that PBR shaders from one engine are easy to port to another. That is only [partially] true if your shaders are made of texture maps only - most are not. And even then, DS will not import most greyscale maps from Poser, no matter of if you render with 3DL or I-ray. Octane will not import anything (even textures) from native Superfly shaders in Poser - not even from the Physical Surface node. Even if you use a standard Poser Surface root, Octane will still skip most of the greyscale maps. If your materials use shader nodes, the bigger the chance it will mess up the transfer. In general, no rendering engine supports native shader nodes from another engine - be it PBR or not.

In addition, PBR is definitely not a standard. Octane lights and shaders work completely different from, say, I-ray MDL and especially from V-ray. Each of those aim for a completely different rendering paradigm, calculating light and shaders in whole different ways. As it comes down, PBR was not created to standardize things. Each rendering engine uses its own interpretation of what should be standard, meaning each has their own. For instance, POV-ray uses purely raytracing, meaning it could be considered the only really-unbiased engine in existence. All the others use pixel sampling, meaning they are, in a way, biased. In theory, they would only achieve true unbiased results if you let them render forever (literally), which would be impractical.

That is, Octane is more unbiased than Firefly, but less than POV-ray. Everything is allowed because there is no standard for PBR. Even Octane ships with 3 different rendering cores, depending on how you want to render, where one is not even unbiased (Direct Light). Use PMC (brute-force Monte Carlo raytracing) if your scene has lots of transparency and caustics. Otherwise use Light Path Tracing because it's faster than PMC. Each of these rendering cores have different configurations and parameters - there is no standard even between them.

This lack of standardization between PBR engines is a good thing, though. For example, V-ray can produce exquisite renders of ceramics that other rendering engines can't even come close. It has the best materials definition model. I-ray has the best solution for rendering cloth fabrics. Lux Render has the best real-world light rendering. And Octane has the fastest rendering engine of all. Each is particularly good on some things, but none if the best in everything. and they are all mutually incompatible because there is no standard.

 

[Janet]

I really like Octane. I'm able to render sunlight for the first time since Vue.

 

[Ken1171]

Oh yes, Octane is great for outdoor scenes. You can get great results with a single directional light.