


This review will be focusing on the 3DS Max plugin, though many of the same features are present no matter the platform. and a competitively priced cloud-based edition to be released later this year. The renderer comes in many flavours: as a standalone application for OSX, Windows and Linux an expanding roster of plugins that bring native Octane rendering to 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, Autocad, Softimage, etc. In March 2012 Refractive Software was bought by Otoy, developers of LightStage and Octane’s sister product Brigade, a real time GPU-based cloud game engine. Octane started life as a product of Refractive Software, founded by Terrence Vergauwen, a key developer of LuxRender. And now Octane Render is fresh out of commercial beta promising ease of use, interactivity, integration into a wide range of applications and the claim of being “the first GPU based, un-biased, physically accurate renderer on the market”. The list is already long: Mental Ray, V-Ray, Maxwell, IRay, Indigo, FinalRender, Arion, Thea, Corona, FurryBall GPU on the horizon, etc. When it comes to renderers, 3DS Max users have never had so much choice.
