Unity Technologies has announced that Otoy’s GPU powered OctanceRender is now available for Unity. This integration enables users to create pre-rendered content using OctaneRender Recorder by outputting animations, sequences and stills created using Unity’s timeline, cinemachine and play mode.
In addition, a new PBR viewport is available that shows the game world live as it will appear in the render. Standard Unity shaders are supported or you can use OctaneRender’s node-based materials and lights. In future support for OSL is promised.
There are 3 versions available: Prime, which is free, uses only the primary GPU and has no plugins; Studio, which is $20 a month, allows up to 2 GPUs and includes one integration plugin; and finally Creator, which is $60 a month, allows up to 20 GPUs and 3 additional plugins. Both Studio and Creator include Nuke and After Effects plugins as standard.
In future it will also be possible to use Unity to bake lightmaps, with promised of 10 times the speed of current solutions. This feature is only available in beta at present.
Find out more about this announcement on the Unity blog.
As usual, the makers of Octane underdeliver. They promised a lightmap replacement some time ago and now they give us something no one asked for. Good work!
You can bake lightmap already with it, there’s an open beta for the feature.
Quote from the Unity page: The Unity community can experiment with OctaneRender’s baking system in beta today, and more features and support will come shortly.
They said they are working an an automated baking process on FB. It’s possible to bake lightmaps right now, just not automated yet.