Octane is now available!
1 Like
Except in France 
It’s available in 101 region (for information, Nomad is available in 102).
Not sure if a bug or something.
3 Likes
It works even on a mini 6 with a15 lol…
But it often says it ran out of memory even when it reports a lot of free space left. This might be a bug or some missreporting because it’s not made to work with other than M# processors.
I wonder if someone with m1 or m2 has out of memory issues as I plan to get m2 pro because of octane.
BTW in past I’ve used octane on laptop with 6GB nvidia gpu. There is probably a lot you can fit even in an 8GB m2 ipad. Probably won’t be huge scenes with a ton of 4K textures but product renderings and isolated characters etc should work.
Probably textures are biggest issue. I managed to get a lot of geometry and full pathtracing in 4K on ipad mini 6. But the moment I introduce just a handful of 4K textures it says out of memory or straight up crashes.
Performance is about 35-40x slower than my 3060+2070 gpu workstation 
but that is still enough for simple product renders.
On top of that if octane allows at some point headless rendering, I could use my desktop as slave for my ipad :D. Renderfam(otoy’s RNDR) is also an option but for some reason octane on ipad isn’t exporting proper packaged .orbx file
We are still missing proper subD modeling and animation tools for ipad. But I can already see myself doing some light work fully on ipad thanks to proper rendering capability.
2 Likes
Laci_Laci Could you please post some renderings and time?
1 Like
Sure, I only have some quick tests as I didn’t have much time to test it… Each rendering was just running few minutes, 3-5 max?
this first one is just quick shapr3d model imported into one of the default scenes:
This is a ~1million poly Tree with around 30 instances rendered in 4K that uses opacity mapped leaves and translucency! Using full pathtracing kernel:
Another 4K rendering of one of the default scenes that come with octane:
This doesn’t make much sense but the wing has small bumps from displacement!:
This is iPad mini with a15 and I get a lot of crashes from low memory even though it reports more than 70% memory free… I would like to know how much better an M2 pro performs and what it can fit into 8G ram before I buy one.
It should be good enough for directly lit product renderings etc. I don’t know how well it performs with random walk subsurface scattering(demo scene crashes for me) but I guess rendering realistic characters with sss and hair could be pretty slow. Another area that I would probably avoid is interiors and anything relying on GI. That is slow even on high end nvidia GPU’s.
Keep in mind I have years of experience with octane on desktop so I know how to built scenes properly and optimize rendering. It’s no rocket science but default settings aren’t looking good and don’t perform too well on low end HW. Don’t expect to just throw things on it and get a pretty image. But I assume people who are interested in octane know what it is.
In general any apple silicon even the best and most expensive sucks hard in rendering/pathtracing compared to even mainstream gaming nvidiaGPU. It has no hardware raytracing support and no acceleration like nvidia optix for dense geometry ray intersections, most software isn’t fully ported on metal either and there are often problems… BUT while a desktop workstation with apple silicon is nonsense and waste of money, having somewhat capable gpu in iPad and pairing that with a renderfarm or ~2K desktop that you would use as renderfarm is very very attractive.
Finally, the biggest hurdle is getting proper models for octane. This is why I stress that we need proper subd/low poly editing capabilities. Not just for modeling but generating proper normal shading breaks and material per polygroup assignmets, texture mapping, setting up transforms/pivot etc.
It is incredibly difficult to build complex asset that utilizes these things on ipad and often you would need to go through multiple apps and “hack” your way around to do something that’s just a basic thing in some desktop DCC software. But let’s hope this momentum of getting actual pro software on iPad’s keeps on going…
EDIT: I see all of the images got downscaled in forum so you just have to take my word it was rendered at 4K lol…(except first one that was 2160x1524)
1 Like
I have a m1. If you want you can attach scenes you’d like tested and I can render them out to see if it will meet your requirements. I’ve not had any crashes on demo scenes. I’ve downloaded some test scenes as well and everything renders fine so far. I’m actually quite surprised
1 Like
@Wandrinsheep
if you open this scene and on the cogwheel (the lowest button on the right panel) switch the kernel to pathtracing/default is direct light, what is the ms/s number down on the ui after like 15 seconds? Thats the performance metric in octane.
1 Like
0.98ms/sec
1 Like
Good, so not a mind blowing difference but I guess m2 could get 2x the performance of A15… Yeah I guess I could get some professional product rendering done on ipad pro with a little effort.
2 Likes
Yea plus a lot more memory to work with. 7513 is how much I have free on my 8gb model. I’ll texture up my models and try to get some good renders going. It’s been a while since I’ve used any major render software though
Oh yes, more memory is needed definitely. Does the denoiser work for you? It crashes on the mini and i’m not sure if it’s a bug.
when you enable advanced mode and scroll down the menu with the arrows. uncheck denoise on completion and enable denoiser+wait like 20 samples until it either works or crashes
1 Like
Just tested it, it works. Didn’t crash.
1 Like
Thanks to both of you (@Laci_Laci and @Wandrinsheep) for your very encouraging feedback as soon as it comes out for France I will acquire it for sure. This has only inflated my enthusiasm, Having been an anti-Apple fervent for years, I am obliged to recognize that their ambitions are really shaking up our infographic world. So thank you Apple, the dev (@stephomi) for offering us such creative mobility.
1 Like
I’m enjoying reading this and thank ppl for commenting on their experiences of Octane on iPad.
I’m really surprised how little there is, outside of this forum, on the topic topic. Subreddits v.little, YouTube almost nothing yet, even Otoy forum pretty baron.
Quite attend imo.
Does anyone know how to import models into the iPad app? I have been searching for answers online but there is very little to find online.
5 Likes
subscribed and liked your vid, thanks for posting this!
LDR mode will render lower dynamic range and also allow to control color management through imager.
This means using either ACES override or custom lookup tables or camera response (these settings are ignored when rendering in hdr mode). I noticed some banding when using custom .cube LUTs with the ipad version that aren’t present on desktop.
HDR mode is for some reason enabled by default and i guess it is ipad specific as this is not present in desktop version, furthermore saving image in this mode will save hdr image that will look very bland/underexposed on some other device. I’m not sure how this works.
I’m the wrong person to talk about Octane X - the video is by Steve Talkowski and I just posted the link.
1 Like
Oh I’m sorry, had two beers and I’m already confused.
2 Likes