Cloud-based rendering could be coming to DAZ Studio soon, as Otoy has purchased New Zealand’s Refractive Software. The news from GDC 2012 is that Otoy will now reportedly pair its cloud-gaming power with Refractive’s GPU-rendering software. The result will be Refractive’s Octane plugin presented as a cloud-renderer… “for DAZ 3D Studio”. No time-frame on that yet, but possibly 2012?
Although quite how a home user will send the bundle of data (FBX?) required for the cloud render, is another matter, especially on slow broadband uplink speeds.
The standalone desktop version of Octane costs only $99. So there’s hope that the DAZ Studio version would be at the same affordable cost. Poser users can already use Octane. My guess is perhaps $250 a year with the cloud rendering thrown in? That would certainly be cheaper than that the dual top-end Nvidia graphics cards needed to run Octane optimally on its own. Even then, you might need to scale down your 4000px skin textures on your DAZ exports.
One of the interesting aspects of Octane’s blurb is that…
“Octane Render provides [a] ‘What You See Is What You Get’ rendering environment […] The viewport on the screen IS the final render”
Nice, especially for 32-bit systems. But don’t think it’s going to replace software built on game engines, like Lumion and iClone any time soon. Here’s a real-world Octane user review, just published…
“At work, I use a fairly old quad-core workstation with bags of RAM. A 1080p frame with AO, some reasonably complex geometry and soft shadows will take me around 3 and a half minutes to render in Cinema4D’s native renderer. In Octane I can get much higher quality (including, I might add, working AO) in about 1 and a half minutes.”
Not bad, and no doubt useful for shaving down a commercial production company’s billing times. But what I want is genuine WYSIWYG 1080px in the viewport at 60 frames per second, like a videogame.
