At a separate session, Otoy discussed OctaneRender Cloud Edition a bit more in depth. It will be entering beta in a few weeks, and pricing for render time is estimated to be $1 per hour per GPU--so the near real-time response seen in the video above would be $112 per hour. This pricing is comparable with the per CPU hour prices for CPU-based rendering at most commercial renderfarms. Their system will operate on a 'render credits' paradigm in order to weigh pricing based on use, so there will be spot pricing available making it cheaper to render on unused GPUs during off-peak times.
Otoy has invested heavily in a Kepler-based GPU renderfarm for use in its cloud service. The GPU-equipped rack units are interconnected via InfiniBand to give the best possible inter-GPU connection between GPUs on disparate systems.
OctaneRender Itself
OctaneRender has been in development - and in beta - for most of the past two years and GTC was the first major event for them after their release last November. It is an unbiased physically-based renderer so that while many operations that 'cost extra' (i.e. take extra time) in most renderers are inherent to its renders, many of the standard 'cheats' for 3d rendering are simply unavailable. (More about this in a forthcoming article on GPU processing.) Because of the way that OctaneRender works, changes to the render resolution make comparatively little difference to the render times.
OctaneRender is available in standalong versions as well as plugin-based or ecport script-based versions for the following applications:
- Autodesk 3DsMax
- Autodesk Maya
- Autodesk Softimage
- Autodesk AutoCAD
- Smith Micro Poser
- DAZ Studio
- Maxon Cinema4D
- Google Sketchup
- Luxology Modo
- Newtek Lightwave
- Rhinoceros3D
- Blender
Pricing for OctaneRender standalone is $255/199 euros. Prices for the plugin for different applications vary between applications. Precise availability of the OctaneRender Cloud service and exact pricing was not available at press time.
