Let There Be Light

OctaneRender®, out of the box, can immediately mimic the light that you live with every day (when using the Path Tracing or Photon Tracing kernels). You can place a light in a dark void, and have it properly illuminate the world around it, just as what happens in the real world — your world.

Octane is very good at lighting — so good, in fact, that may be the reason you initially chose to use it. Live Viewer, your real-time preview window into Octane, is easy to use, and feedback is immediate. There is nothing faster than Live Viewer in its class, offering near immediate feedback to every lighting change (and material change) you make. You can learn more about Live Viewer here.

Lighting in Octane

Lighting in OctaneRender® is derived using either an Texture or HDRI Environment node, one of the Octane-specific lights, or via a Texture or Blackbody Emission node connected to a Diffuse, Universal, or Standard Surface material and applied to geometry. Using an IES light profile texture geometry can be shaded to behave like a physical light in the scene.

BACKGROUND

OctaneRender Standalone is the original Octane application, and origin of the OctaneRender engine. The Standalone application is node-based, wiring connections together for a desired feature or result. OctaneRender plugins may choose to simplify the user experience (depending upon the user interface guidelines of the host application) and not expose these nodes, unless specifically requested to do so by you.

When you export an ORBX file and load it into Octane Standalone, these nodes will be presented in Octane's native environment, where they can be manipulated as needed.

By default, when you open or create a scene and launch the Live Viewer, the scene is illuminated with a white Default Environment texture, located in Octane Settings > Settings > Environment. When you add an Environment object to the scene, this default node is then ignored, and the white light overridden. To start from no illumination at all, you can change the color of the Default Environment to black, or you can add a black Texture Environment. You can then add lights from Live Viewer > Objects > Lights, create materials with emissive textures or add an high dynamic range texture to illuminate the scene.

Light Settings

All Octane lights have a Power node (float), Temperature, Texture (RGB Spectrum, Gaussian or Float), and Distribution input (RGB Spectrum or Float).

Mesh Emitters

Analytic Lights