OctaneRender

What do you like best?

Octane produces beautiful results that reward thoughtful lighting and texturing. With Octane, you can achieve photo realistic results like no other engine - it's fast, controllable and fun to use. Octane provides its users with intuitive render options that give the user time to focus much of their planning on the actual creative process and not troubleshooting settings. While octane is easy to pick up, it has a wide array of complex features that support OSL script, volumetric shading, and much more to enable its use in a wide variety of applications.

What do you dislike?

Octane can at times crash, and while it's plugin integration with my 3d suite of choice (Cinema 4D) has been done well, there are opportunities for improvement. I would like to see more capabilities to integrate cinema 4d's tools into the Octane workflow. While I love that Octane has a minimal approach to settings, I would like a little bit of freedom to break out of the nonbiased workflow at times, for example separating reflection and refraction values. Finding the latest versions on the forums and being left to navigate them for patches has never felt like an ideal solution to updating my software.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Octane has, quite simply, enabled me to drastically improve the quality of my work. Whether it's textures, lighting, or complex materials that require demanding render times such as Displacement or Subsurface Scattering, the beauty and quickness of Octane has been a lifechanger. It cannot be understated how important quick results in a live render viewer are for a creative - being able to quickly see and adjust your render liberates a creative from long render times slowly trying to develop a render. The time you save with octane, both in its quick render speeds and intuitive workflow, enables a much more productive workflow.