Friday, March 22nd, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Otoy announces Octane Render Cloud Edition


Otoy CEO Jules Urbach joins Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang on stage at the GTC conference to demo the company’s new cloud render service. Octane Render Cloud Edition will enter beta in the US in July.

Otoy has announced Octane Render Cloud Edition: a new cloud-based rendering service for its physically based renderer.

Users will be able to process render jobs in the cloud on between 4 and 128 GPUs, for a cost of “a maximum of $1/GPU hour”. The service will roll out in beta in the US in July, with international support later in the year.

According to Otoy: “The scaling is perfect, i.e. rendering a still or animation on 128 GPUs simultaneously will be exactly 128x faster than on one GPU. Queue time should be nil.”

“We have put a lot of time into optimizing scene loading and updating to get immediate feedback from all GPUs … a few seconds of rendering are sufficient to get noise-free renders at very high resolutions.”

Demoed live at GTC
The announcement was made during Wednesday’s Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, where Otoy CEO Jules Urbach joined Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on stage.

During the session, Urbach showed assets from a real commercial job being rendered in the cloud on 112 4GB Kepler-based GPUs. The demo starts around 12:00 in the video above.

Aiming for ‘every single 3D app’
Octane Render is currently available as a standalone edition and as a plugin for 3ds Max, with plugins for Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D, Poser and ArchiCAD in commercial beta.

Further versions, including modo, Softimage and Blender are in development, and Otoy is thinking bigger still.

“Our target is that every single 3D app at the end of this year is going to have this capability,” Urbach told the GTC audience.

Read more about Octane Render Cloud Edition on Otoy’s forum