OctaneRender 2 is out

• Displacement mapping
• Object and vertex motion blur – blurring effect for inanimate objects as well as geometry deformations
• Hair and fur – optimized hair render primitive allows to reduce memory usage by 20 times compared to previous processes. The new version also simulates the distribution and fluidity of movement of those primitives.
• Support for OpenSubDiv surfaces
• Render-time rounded edges
• Random color texture for instances
• Improved sky rendering
• Region rendering
• Network rendering
• New stereo rendering modes
• Compatibility with Brigade – expanded integration with Otoy’s cloud rendering technology for video games. Brigade allows to open scenes created in OctaneRender and walk through those scenes in real-time over the cloud.

OctaneRender 2 is available as a standalone client, as plugins for 3DS Max and SketchUp (with plugins for other 3D applications rolling out over the next few weeks), and via Octane Cloud Workstation on Amazon EC2. For a limited time, users who upgrade to OctaneRender 2 can also upgrade an existing plugin license at no additional cost to make use of an available OctaneRender 2 plugin or receive a voucher towards a forthcoming plugin. More on Otoy’s website.

Otoy has also revealed recently upcoming developments they’re working on for a 2.x version, which include render pass output for lighting layers, a deep compositing pipeline, out-of-core rendering (scenes that don’t fit into graphics memory will be supported through out of core rendering) and user-defined GPU procedurals. An After Effects plugin is also in the works.