Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/711111
52 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2016 52 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2016 with options for the visibility, position, size and haziness of the sun as well as the color of the sky. Setting up Image-Based Lighting with an HDR is easy and fun. To do it, an HDR image of a sky, sunset or the interior of a room is applied to an infinitely large sphere surrounding your scene. This image provides the lighting information and also appears in reflections. Because Octane is so fast, you can twirl the HDR around your scene and the lighting and reflections update on the fly. A very cool tool. Finally, Octane area lights behave just as physical studio lights would in the real world. The recently announced Octane 3.1 now supports a wide range of emerging industry standards, including Open Shader Language (OpenSL), OpenVDB for 3D particle effects, volumetric light field primitives, deep motion buffers and support for Octane Render Cloud — an on-demand cloud rendering service offered by OTOY that is capable of harnessing thousands of GPUs. MORE IS FASTER A great thing about GPU rendering is that you can increase your render speed by adding more GPUs to your system — very useful for large renders. Adding another GPU renders twice as fast; four GPUs render four times faster. There is one caveat to GPU rendering, however. You must load your scene into the GPU's RAM first, so you're limited by the amount of memory it has. This may be an issue with extremely large scenes containing huge numbers of polygons and lots of high-resolution textures. This not an issue with CPU renderers, however. To avoid running out of memory, get a GPU with as much RAM as possible. My NVIDIA Quadro M6000 GPU has 12 GB of RAM and so far I have not run into any problems. As GPUs continue to improve, you can bet that the amount of RAM they have will increase as well. Models with 24 to 32 GB of memory are just around the corner. A VISIONARY COMPANY OTOY's strategic vision and direction is set by CEO Jules Urbach, a particularly innovative and thoughtful software developer. I recently had a chance to interview him for this article. Producing a revolutionary GPU rendering technology such as Octane Render is of course a remarkable and worthy achievement. However, upon sitting down and speaking with Urbach, it soon became clear that his is an inventive mind sharply focused on new and emerging technologies, including light fields and virtual reality. Light fields are something about which Urbach TECH TIPS CONTINUED ON PAGE 58 Clockwise from top left: An example of the stunning, photorealistic imagery possible with OTOY's GPU renderer, Octane. From Mask by Leonstudio VFX. Octane 3.1 now supports OpenVDB for 3D voxel particle effects such as clouds, smoke and explosions. Speaking of clouds, OTOY now offers an on-demand cloud rendering service capable of harnessing tens of thousands of GPUs. Image by Moritz Reichartz. Speed is crucial in the fast-paced world of motion picture production. The slightest delay is magnified over hundreds of thousands of frames. GPU rendering solves one of the most frustrating and schedule-destroying setbacks in the industry. Rendered with Octane by Cornelius Dämmrich.