GPU rendering is becoming an industry standard in the fields of Visual Effects, Motion Graphics, and Advertising. By utilizing the high-end graphics cards today, computers can see a performance increase of several magnitudes using render systems optimized for GPUs. OctaneRender is one of the most popular render engines because of its integration across multiple softwares and the libraries of materials available for it.

In this article we will introduce to you about Otoy’s Octane Render Engine. This will be a good starter if you’ve never heard of Octane or if you’re curious about what is the best render farm or most powerful cloud GPU rendering for Octane.

There are definitely some terms or features used in this article that may sound a bit geeky, so we created a 3D render Forum. You can join and ask whatever you have in your mind about 3D software, render farm service, so on… if you find yourself stumped by anything written below.

Let’s go!

Octane is one of the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer. Octane was developed by a New Zealand-based company called Refractive Software, Ltd in 2008, and was later taken over by the Company OTOY in 2012. Now it is being used in feature films, commercials, and even architectural rendering. See the list of 3D software which includes access to Octane below:

Additionally, with the ability to run Octane in the cloud, it is likely to become even more integrated into the creative process of these industries.

Octane is a GPU render engine that uses a way of calculating final rendered images that aims to be photo-realistic. Octane is an unbiased rendering engine using GPU technology, which is close to physical accuracy because each pixel is pushed through the real-life path a particle of light would travel in the scene. This rigorous process results in a high amount of chaos (think noise) in the initial pass of an unbiased render. After a few passes, the image begins to smooth out with the rate of errors (noise) decreasing over time. Although an unbiased render engine will produce exceptional quality and realism, far superior to that of a biased render engine, an unbiased render is never “done”. It will render forever until you simply save it and call it done.

Here are some pros to select Octane renderer in your career. 

• Fast rendering:  If you’re currently using standard or physical rendering in Cinema4D, you know that sometimes a single frame can take minutes to render for a simple scene. Octane cuts through simple scenes like butter and turns those minutes into seconds.
• Octane increases your workflow speed with liveviewer: the liveviewer in Octane allows users to see a rendered scene in almost real time. Especially since Octane uses GPUs to process the rendering. It is awesome to see the update in real-time whenever an object, a light added or texture attribute is changed. 
• The Octane community is so big: at the time of writing, Octane Facebook Group has nearly 40 thousands members. Plus, there are many other places that you can find support for Octane such as on Quora, or on the official Otoy’s forum.

Besides, Octane has a pretty strong selling point. Octane has an “octane render cloud” which allows their users to send render jobs to Otoy’s GPU render farm via a built-in tool. However it is super expensive, so you should consider when it comes to really large jobs.

OctaneRender supports all major platforms:

• Windows® 7 or higher (64-bit)
• Linux® (64-bit)
• macOS® 10.13.6 High Sierra (NOTE: 10.14 Mojave and 10.15 Catalina do not support NVIDIA CUDA)

OctaneRender requires the latest CUDA® 10 drivers and a CUDA-enabled NVIDIA® video card with support for compute capability 3.0 or higher. It also requires a minimum of 8 GB RAM, and we recommend 16 GB or more. GPUs from the GeForce® line are usually clocked higher and render faster than the more expensive Quadro® and Tesla GPUs. OctaneRender scales perfectly in a multi-GPU configuration and can use different types of NVIDIA cards at once. If there’s not enough VRAM, then you can enable OctaneRender’s Out-Of-Core features.

As OctaneRender does not use the CPU for rendering, a fast multi-core CPU is not required, but it does significantly improve scene-loading speeds.

For Octane Version 3.03.2 or higher, Nvidia GTX Titan X, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 are recommended, and with Octane Version 3.08 or higher, Octane users should use Nvidia RTX or Nvidia Titan V.

iRender is a Vietnamese company operating internationally that is based on the model of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), which rents the GPUs and CPUs on the cloud for 3D rendering. The GPUs used are GTX 1080Ti, RTX 2080Ti and RT3090 with heavy-duty processors having multiple cores to support the heaviest workload. At iRender, we provide a variety of packages with powerful CPU & GPU: 1/6 Nvidia GTX & RTX and CPU configuration: Dual Xeon E5-2673 v3 (24 cores), RAM: 128 GB and Storage (NVMe SSD) is 512GB, which allows users to utilize the rendering speed.

If you are using Octane version from 3.03.2 to lower than 3.08, server 5 at iRender is the best choice for your Octane project. 

If you are using Octane version from 3.08 or higher, you can try our higher packages with 6x RTX 2080Ti, 6x RTX 3080 and 6x RTX 3090.

If you are looking for a solution to speed up your Octane renderer, here is our solution iRender – one of the most powerful cloud GPU rendering for Octane.

• Powerful Hardware

OctaneRender 2018.1 and higher support NVIDIA NVLink, which allows sharing data between two GPUs via an NVLink Bridge, on supported RTX GPU configurations. As per written above, the multiple cards servers provided by iRender online render farm combined with NVIDIA RTX graphics (6x GeForce RTX 2080 Ti / 6x RTX 3080/ 6x RTX 3090) and NVLink, bring Octane users unprecedented rendering power, performance, and capability wherever work takes. Best of all, there’s a configuration that’s perfect for what you do.

Let’s see a rendering test with Octane project on server 8 (6x RTX 3090) at iRender:

And Let’s see a rendering test with Octane project on server 6 (6x RTX 2080Ti) at iRender:

• Affordable Price

You will be charged on a per-minute basis. Depending on the type of server you choose, we will issue you an invoice once you shut down the servers, so that you will control your balance easily.

The hourly rental for package 6x Nvidia GTX 1080Ti is $4.5 per machine hour, 6x Nvidia RTX 3090 is $22 per machine hour, 6x Nvidia RTX 2080 is $9 per machine hour. But you can always save 30%, 50% or 60% with our Fixed Rental feature. For those who’re in need of a server more than a day, or have an extremely large project, we advise to choose a daily/ weekly/monthly rental package. The discount is attractive (30% for daily packages, 50% for weekly, and 60% for monthly packages). 

• Simple Process

We believe that ‘less is more’, so the user’s interface is designed easily to use. It takes just a few steps to get started. First, register to the service, then create a new work environment or better known as a system image. This work environment will be saved and automatically loaded for the user as soon as logging into the account. After that, a remote desktop connection will be set up, and the user will be provided with a file with login credentials. The file transfer process is unique, it can transfer files even when the server is turned off, so the users can make changes any time and it’s free to transfer. Furthermore, major cloud transferring platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive are also supported. Additionally, multiple servers can also be used, and the system image can automatically be generated, thus providing usefulness to the users.

•  24/7 Real Human Support

If you choose to render your projects with iRender, you can feel extra safe that we have a dedicated CPU & GPU infrastructure and enthusiastic technical supporters available 24 hours a day, 7 days in a week to answer any queries you might have regarding your rendering jobs. 

We hope this overview of powerful cloud GPU rendering for Octane has shown you some information to utilize a GPU renderer like Octane in the cloud. At iRender, we try our best everyday to offer our beloved customers the power and expedience they need to put the project, concept, or presentation together quickly and beautifully. We help to turn a low-performance computer into a supercomputer using the cloud rendering service.

To get started with your Octane rendering pipeline, sign up HERE to get FREE to test servers.

Sincerely thank you & Have a great day!