A kernel in OctaneRender is the central part of the rendering engine that interfaces with the rendering hardware (graphics card or 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.). There are four rendering kernels in OctaneRender: Direct Lighting, Path Tracing and PMC and Infochannels. These can be set in the Node Inspector within the OctaneRender window when a Render Target node is selected (figure 1).
Figure 1: Accessing the Kernel types in the OctaneRender window.
A small subset of Kernel options can be set directly in the OctaneRender Nuke node (figure 2).
Figure 2: The Kernel settings available in the OctaneRender Nuke node.