OTOY, the company that makes the Octane Render engine and the Octane Renderer has decided that they will be making all versions of the Octane Render program free to students. This program comes as both a standalone and a plug-in for all of the popular 3D modeling applications to help improve the rendering capabilities of your GPU. Some of the most popular applications that they support are 3DS Max, Poser, Maya, ArchiCAD, Lightwave, Cinema 4D and Rhino. They also have beta versions of Octane Render for MODO, Autodesk Inventor, Softimage, Blender, DAZ Studio, Revit and AutoCAD.
Image created by PixelRush using Octane Render
However, for the student versions they are only making the standalone version, Blender, Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya (not yet released). All you have to do is to get the license at the links provided above and then enter your .edu email address. The guys and girls at OTOY have clearly recognized the importance of making their software accessible to students so that they are familiar with it well into their professional careers. Not to mention the fact that a lot of students are likely to pirate the software anyways since they can’t afford it in many cases. By making these versions of OTOY’s Octane Render, they are not only expanding their current market, but also their market for future paid customers in the future as well. Hopefully students that are working on 3D modelling and design are able to utilize these plugins for their work as it should help them properly utilize the power they most likely already have in their gaming computers.
However, if you run an AMD GPU, you will not be able to take advantage of OTOY’s Octane Render program as it still isn’t supported. As of right now, Octane is still only a CUDA-based program, which is a bit disappointing but ultimately comes as a result of support and cooperation between OTOY and AMD. So, if you are a student looking to get into the 3D graphics profession and do some interesting designs, you can now tap OTOY’s Octane Render program for free with your .edu email address. Do keep in mind that right now you can only use it for the three programs we mentioned above and Maya supports is coming soon.
Image created by Radiance using Octane Render
We’ll keep you posted on other OTOY news, including our ongoing review of OTOY’s own Octane Render Cloud solution which allows you to render your scenes in the cloud rather than having to buy expensive computers and to have to constantly take all of the files and software and hardware with you. It also has a ton of other possible applications, but we’ll get back to you as we finish our testing of that as well.
