Pathtracing is an advanced "unbiased" render method. This render kernel can obtain photorealistic image quality with physical certainty. Pathtracing may cause problems in some small light sources or you may not get full efficiency in the case of caustic reflections. In such cases you can use PMC Kernel (see PMC section). Figure 1 shows the Path tracing settings in the KernelsBy definition, this is the central or most important part of something. In Octane, the Kernels are the heart of the render engine. tab.
Figure 1: The Pathtracing settings in the Kernels tab.
Maximum Samples
sets the maximum number of samples per pixel before the rendering process stops. The higher the number of samples per pixel, the cleaner the render. There is no rule as to how many samples per pixel are required for a good render, it is subjective and may vary depending on the content and complexity of the scene being rendered.
sets the maximum number of diffuse reflections when GI Mode is set to Diffuse.
Controls the number of time a ray can be refracted before dying. Higher numbers mean higher render times but more color bleeding and more details in transparent materials. Low numbers can introduce artifacts or turn some refractions into pure black.
Ray Epsilon
Is the distance between the geometry and the light ray when calculating ray intersections for lighting and shadowing. Larger values push rays away from the geometry surface. Lower values are more accurate, but can cause artifacts on large or distant objects. Ray Epsilon is similar to raytracing bias in other rendering engines. Adjust Ray Epsilon to reduce artifacts in large scale scenes.
Filter Size
Sets the filter size in terms of pixels. This can improve aliasing artifacts in the render. However, if the filter is set too high, the image can become blurry.
Alpha Shadow
Allows any object with transparency (specular materials, materials with opacity settings and alpha channels) to cast a shadow accordingly instead of behaving as a solid object.
Caustic Blur
Sets the caustic reflections to look sharp or soft. A low value will make the caustics look sharp. When high values are entered, the caustics begin to appear blurry.
GI Clamp
Clamps the contribution for each path to the specified value. By reducing the this value, you can reduce the amount of fireflies caused by sparse but very strongly contributing paths, i.e. it reduces noise by removing energy. Caustic Blur, on the other hand, reduces noise by blurring caustics, but conserves energy. Keep this number between 1-3.
This option removes background images or colors created by the SunSky environment node from the rendered image while not affecting any lighting cast by the environment. This can be useful if the user wants to composite the render over another image and does not want the background to be present. Note that objects appearing in the RGB channels will have a bleeding edge which may appear as noise artifacts however these edges are not included in the alpha channel itself.
Keep Environment
Is used in conjunction with the Alpha Channel setting. It allows the background to be visible in the rendered image while at the same time, keeping the alpha channel.
Path Termination Power
High values increase render speed but lead to higher noise in dark areas.
Coherent ratio
Increasing this value will increase the render speed but may introduce low-frequency noise or blotches. Eliminating the blotchy appearance may require minimum of a few hundred or even a few thousand samples per pixel to go away depending on the contents of the scene.
Static Noise
Keeps noise patterns static between rendered frames in a sequence when enabled.
Parallel Samples
Controls how many samples are calculated in parallel. Smaller values require less memory to store the samples state but may cause the render to be a bit slower. High values require more memory but can reduce render time. The change in performance depends on the scene and the GPUThe GPU is responsible for displaying graphical elements on a computer display. The GPU plays a key role in the Octane rendering process as the CUDA cores are utilized during the rendering process. architecture.
Maximum Tile Samples
Controls the number of samples per pixel that Octane will render before storing the result in the render buffer. A higher number means that results arrive less often in the film buffer.
Minimize Net Traffic
Distributes only the same tile to the net render slaves until the max samples/pixel has been reached for that tile and only then will the next tile is distributed to slaves when enabled. Work done by local GPUs is not affected by this option. This way a slave can merge all its results into the same cached tile until the master switches to a different tile.
Adaptive SamplingA method of sampling that determines if areas of a rendering require more sampling than other areas instead of sampling the entire rendering equally.
Enables adaptive sampling.
Noise Threshold
Specifies the smallest relative noise level. When the noise estimate of a pixel becomes less than this value, sampling will be switched off for this pixel. Good values are in the range of 0.01 - 0.03. The default is 0.02.
Min. Adaptive Samples
Specifies the minimum samples that must have been calculated before adaptive sampling kicks in. The reason for this option is the fact that the noise estimate of a pixel is just an estimate with a fairly large initial error. The higher you set the noise threshold, the higher you should also set min. samples, to avoid artifacts.
Expected Exposure
The expected exposure should be approximately the same value as the exposure in the image or 0 to ignore these settings. The default value is 0. This parameter is used by Adaptive Sampling to determine the pixels that are bright and those that are dark - which depends on the exposure setting in the Octane Imager. If the value is not 0, Adaptive Sampling will tweak/reduce the noise estimate of very dark areas of the image. It also will also increase the minimum adaptive samples limit for very dark areas, because very dark areas tend to find paths to light sources irregularly resulting to an otherwise overly optimistic noise estimate.
Group Pixels
Specifies the number of pixels that are handled together. Only if all pixels of a group have reached the noise level, sampling will stop for all of these pixels.