Check out Jules at Unite 2017 to learn about OTOY’s Holographic Workflow
This Made with Unity scene is rendered with OctaneRender for Unity and is available for free on the Asset Store
We’re excited to debut the commercial release of OctaneRender for Unity! This integration marks an important milestone for OTOY, the company I co-founded nine years ago. But I’ve actually been dreaming of this moment even longer.
Since I was a kid, I’ve been focused on realizing a fully functioning Metaverse, a living version of the Holodeck: a virtual world that looks like our own, but one that we can fully customize to our creative or utilitarian desires.
At OTOY we’ve built a big piece of that vision in OctaneRender, a Hollywood-grade render engine that captures light in code for unparalleled scene quality. Our software is used across film, television, games, advertising, product design, and architectural visualization, and works with a full gamut of leading authoring tools from Cinema 4D to Maya.
OctaneRender for Unity is our first integration with a tool that can power the interactive promises of the Holodeck. As a first step, we could not be more excited to open the door to Cinematic Rendering inside of the world’s leading creative engine.
Try it out, give us your feedback, show us your creations, and together we’ll make our childhood dreams come true.
– Jules Urbach, CEO and Co-Founder of OTOY
Cinematic Rendering in Timeline and Play Mode
OctaneRender arms Unity with greater rendering power and quality than the engine has had to date. Born on GPUs, OctaneRender is an unbiased render engine, tracing each ray of light in a scene with physics-grade precision to deliver unrivaled photorealism in CG and VFX.
OctaneRender Recorder now allows you to record animations or sequences made by Timeline, and export that either as a movie file or ORBX format that can leverage OctaneRender Cloud. Recorder makes composing films through Timeline, Cinemachine, and now Play Mode, that much easier.
In advance of next year’s Octane 4 with Brigade, our real-time path-tracer, OctaneRender for Unity is limited to pre-rendered content. However through Cinematic Rendering and the upcoming Live Lightmap Baking, OctaneRender for Unity expands what you can do in the engine today.
This Made with Unity scene is rendered with OctaneRender for Unity and is available for free on the Asset Store
The PBR (Physic-Based Rendering) Viewport
One of the more immediately noticeable OctaneRender for Unity features is the PBR Viewport. This provides a window into your scene as viewed by a path-traced render engine. With Cinematic Rendering in OctaneRender, what you see is what you get. You can now use a Hollywood-grade render engine inside of Unity to create cinematic output from Cinemachine and Timeline.
The PBR Viewport showing a glimpse into the Docking Bay scene available on the Asset Store
OctaneRender Materials and Lighting
For pre-rendered sequences, OctaneRender steps up the quality of the scene immediately, even with standard Unity shaders. You can also choose to leverage OctaneRender’s node-based material and lighting system, which improves the overall look even further with physics-based quality.
In future versions just around the corner, OctaneRender for Unity will also support Open Shading Language (OSL) for even greater flexibility.
You can find tutorials walking you through the new workflow here.
Views of The Orbital and Docking Bay scenes available on the Asset Store
Live Lightmap Baking Beta
Currently available in beta, Live Lightmap Baking will soon be completed and launched. GPU-accelerated baking can deliver 10x the speeds of current solutions, redefining how lightmapping in Unity is done today. Because OctaneRender can read Unity materials and lights, even legacy lightmap workflows can be accelerated with path-tracing. The Unity community can experiment with OctaneRender’s baking system in beta today, and stay tuned for more features and support to come shortly
