Little Octane adventure

[MetinSeven]

So I decided to go on a little adventure trying Octane Render, creating a Halloween birthday cake image.

My conclusion: it's a fine renderer, but I prefer LuxCoreRender, because:

1. I like the look of LuxCore's renderings more.

2. I find Octane overly complicated, with too many settings. For example: image texture node Gamma needs to be set to 1.0, Blender Color Management settings need to be changed to None, Octane Camera Imager needs to be activated, Gamma needs to be set to 1.0 there as well, then you need to determine a LUT, and so on. Too much hassle, not artist-friendly.

3. To render with Octane you need to install a separate build, and I'm used to working with the latest Blender alpha builds for the latest features.

4. There's no material / texture preview mode in the Blender viewport.

5. LuxCoreRender is fully free and open source, while Octane is only free for Blender on Windows and a 1-GPU PC.

6. To run Octane you need to install a separate Octane Render server and run that each time.

Just my personal impression, not an attempt to start a renderer war.

[MetinSeven]

Someone just pointed out to me that in LuxCore you're also expected to turn off Blender Color Management and activate it in the LuxCore camera. Didn't know that yet.

[B.Y.O.B.]

Someone just pointed out to me that in LuxCore you're also expected to turn off Blender Color Management and activate it in the LuxCore camera. Didn't know that yet.

Not really, you can use Blender's color management and the LuxCore imagepipeline together.

[MetinSeven]

Someone just pointed out to me that in LuxCore you're also expected to turn off Blender Color Management and activate it in the LuxCore camera. Didn't know that yet.

Not really, you can use Blender's color management and the LuxCore imagepipeline together.

Thanks. Good to know that. It's what I thought, because I haven't encountered color deviations in my LuxCore renderings yet, and I never changed Blender's Color Management.

But is it nevertheless better / advised to turn off Blender Color Management and use LuxCore camera color management?

[B.Y.O.B.]

It depends on what you are working on.
For regular renders (model in Blender, render with Lux, done) I wouldn't want to miss filmic tonemapping of Blender's color management.

However, if you want to render with LuxCore standalone externally, where you have no Blender color management (unless you feed the output back into Blender), you might want to disable Blender's color management to get an accurate preview of what the output will look like.

There might be other edge cases, like matching existing footage, where it could be required to turn off one or the other.

[MetinSeven]

Thanks for the clarification, useful info!

[Dez!]

No no no, I strongly disagree with you!
Using Filmic for Luxcore is like watching a color movie on a black and white TV.

And about Octane I completely agree. I didn't like him either. I had a C4D license. I sold it when I found out that Cycles is also a GPU and it's free. This information was the last straw, after that I became a Blender user.

What a joy it was to discover Luxcore!

[Sharlybg]

No no no, I strongly disagree with you!
Using Filmic for Luxcore is like watching a color movie on a black and white TV.

A pretty strong POV i am curious to see your way to do it.
I mean with Luxcore tonemapper only how do go from a Raw image to gamma corrected one that look more color rich and different than a blender filmic mode ?
Or do you mean that you just color correct everything outside with a 32 bit exr ?

I'm really curious and hope you're right because it would mean i have some margin left if you can do better with Lux tonemapper and get more.

[MetinSeven]

No no no, I strongly disagree with you!
Using Filmic for Luxcore is like watching a color movie on a black and white TV.

Interesting. Like Sharlybg, I would also like to read your explanation for that.

What a joy it was to discover Luxcore!

Definitely! I'm also a fan.

[Dez!]

perhaps I do not understand correctly the dialogue through google translator.
i don't use Filmic:


but I am using Tonemapper: