S3442 – The Convergence of Cinema and Games: From Performance Capture to Final Render. A lot of this research is an intersection of the LightStage research, spherical harmonics (used commonly in games for realtime performance) and their Octane rendering / cloud rendering. To give that perspective, on Avatar, Weta used nine coefficients in PantaRay for their pipeline. The company has already done 25 co-efficient spherical harmonics lighting systems (directional ambient occlusion) – Paul Debevec has actually tested to 8000 coefficients. One possible solution to high end gaming would be a hybrid solution with some local computing on your own GPU and having high end lightmaps, texture maps, voxel maps and more being streamed in from the cloud Octane. As such there are already two large game companies that are looking at this technology for high end realtime ray traced gaming down the track. “But that is just a cost problem,” says Urbach, referring to the amount of hardware you can apply to their linear scaling problem. Already today they can do ray tracing in realtime but with some noise. The company is however eyeing technology two years ahead. The company has their own codecs for streaming and encoding in the gaming space and servicing space.
Octane render farm free#
The farm will be sub 10,000 GPUs for the beta period but it will grow when the cloud Octane rendering moves out of beta. The cloud per hour realtime rendering could be used for gaming, previs and noise free 4K rendering in realtime, the limit would be the latency of your internet or network setup. “To my knowledge, we are the first to build a Kepler rack like this for rendering like this. OTOY are aiming to “significantly beat that price,” says Urbach. But to give one a guide, while OTOY won’t name actual pricing, on Amazon similar computer power would be a couple of dollars per hour.
Octane render farm Offline#
Pricing on the offline and live per hour rendering are not yet released. There will also be a live version, there are iterations we have shown with Autodesk of Max already running Octane without any local GPU and that is one of our core competencies,” he adds. “We are looking at thousands and down the line tens of thousands of GPUs for offline rendering – that will be one way that it will work. “If you wanted a 1000 GPUs on a single process, Octane scales linearly with each GPU you added,” explains Jules Urbach, OTOY chief executive officer. This will allow, when released, users to render on one local Kepler card or on as many GPU farm processors as they like. This is a custom built specialist GPU farm using Nvidia GPUs, this is not a front to a third party farm from say Amazon or some other primary CPU farm provider. The product is launching on Kepler cards, but the cloud solution will allow offline rendering in the cloud, and the company has invested heavily in a GPU cloud render farm.
While Octane runs on the PC, the company is moving to a new cloud solution. OTOY has four main offices – two in LA (including LightStage), and two in New Zealand. Most of the development continues in New Zealand. Octane started life in New Zealand and its original founder Terrence Vergauwen remains central to its development. It was designed from the ground up to tap into the massive – and cheap - computational and rendering power on recent consumer GPUs. This is why Octane Render is so much faster than CPU-based rendering systems. None of the gains OTOY are currently showing would have been viable on consumer GPUs prior to 2010. OTOY also owns LightStage, LLC in Burbank which did the facial scanning for The Avengers, among other films, and Paul Debevec is their “chief scientific consultant”.Ĭlearly these guys know what they are doing. The company has strong links to cloud computing and graphics research. It is the first commercially available unbiased renderer to work exclusively on the GPU, and runs exclusively on Nvidia’s CUDA technology. OTOY sells Octane as a stand alone renderer as well as a plugin to popular 3D applications such as Max and Maya. Octane Render is a real-time 3D unbiased rendering application that was started by the New Zealand company Refractive Software. The product, now released and out of beta, is creating quite a stir for its remarkable GPU-based rendering. OTOYs Octane renderer was previewed in fxguide’s Art of Rendering article in the middle of last year.