Arion: Another GPU based unbiased render engine

A couple days ago I was talking about the announcement of Octane Render with the clever use of the GPU as to create interactive renderings. Besides the speed and interactive nature of the images, Octane still have the advantage of use unbiased methods to create their images, resulting in realistic images. Following this news was the use of OpenCL and LuxRender as an experiment to add this type of functionality to the unbiased and open source render engine. It is still an experiment, but shows a great potential for this type of technology.

Looks like the announcement of Octane Render started a series of other releases based on GPU technology are appearing. We already have a lot of interactive render engines based partially on the GPU like Vray RT and FryRender RT, but in most cases it's necessary some level of precomputing to interact with the scene. The company responsible for FryRender called Random Control announces the development of a competing tool for Octane called Arion. The software works in a very similar way to Octane, with the use of GPU power to render 3d scenes in real time.

They claim that Arion will use not only the GPU but the CPU as well, to provide the fastest and realistic render possible, using unbiased methods. If we visit the official web site of the software it's possible to download several videos demonstrating how the render will work.

arion-render-gpu-unbiased-interactive

And the result is quite similar to what we saw on the Octane Render demo video showed at the time of the announcement. The new feature in Arion is the ability to use other GPU units among a network, just like we already do with distributed render. With this feature Arion promises to multiply the number of cores working on big and complex scenes, making render times even shorter.

So far, there is no price or release date available. It's only an announcement to make everyone know about the software. One thing we can be sure, it will be hard for Arion to be released with a low price like Octane.

By speaking on Octane Render, the public demo is available to download! Go visit the official web site and start testing it!

Blender 3D Architect Pro

Comments

  • Benjamin Bailey (Banor)

    Alright! I’d like to check out the Octane demo 🙂 We’ll see how Arion develops…

  • Rob Jones

    I am a fryrender customer, a very very angry and disappointed customer. Too much marketing, too much nice images and words, but they have lie all us all these years, this arion is a shit product, useless and expensive.I bought fry because of they RC promises, and what we find now is this piece of ****. They are deleting all our complains in their forum, and locking our complains, this is soooo frustating. I wish I had never spend a dollar in random control 🙁 🙁 I feel they have cheat us, and I thinking in some legal actions to get my money back, but I know these things are difficult, any other people in my situation?

    – thanks.

  • txrx

    I’d like to see how the rest of the rendering engines out there fare before I purchased this. I suspect at whole raft of engines will be firing their rays through these unified computing libraries as they start to mature and get better.

    I’d love to be writing these apps, open source or not. This looks to be the cutting edge and trust me I’d rather fork out for a Tesla system or two rather than a shedload of over priced not getting faster quick enough cpu power….

  • Arnaud Meuret

    Just to make things a bit clearer, Dade (David Bucciarelli) had been working for months on the seminal code of what now powers LuxRay:

    http://vimeo.com/7876686

  • Randy Clarkson

    Wow! I am a fryrender customer too, and I couldn’t be any happier with my purchase. I am planning to buy Arion too, actually. If it really provides the same quality as fry at a fraction of the render times this app might become a real game changer…

  • Björn

    I would love to know if Next Limit has something like this planned in their pipeline! That would help their customers with a few purchasing decisions,.

  • Mark

    Simply overpriced and snob, Not even a demo available..yeah right..
    Get the real thing..OCTANE has a down to hearth price and deliver exactly what it says on the tin..pure unbiased GPU renderer and with a gtx470/480 you are on the run…FAST!

  • Damian

    VRAY RT IN FACT , ACTUALLY DO NOT RENDER BY GPU.ITS DO ONLY BY DIRECTX OR OPEN GL BY CPU. (THERE ARE ONLY SOME VIDEOS DEMOSTRATIONS, BUT ITS NOT AVAILABLE COMERCIALLY AT THE MOMENT,)DO MORE RESEARCH WORK BEFORE TO WRITE AN ARTICLE LIKE THIS…

    http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayrt.html
    ;-)…
    I AM WRONG?

    “I am a fryrender customer, a very very angry and disappointed customer. Too much marketing, too much nice images and words, but they have lie all us all these years, this arion is a shit product, useless and expensive.I bought fry because of they RC promises, and what we find now is this piece of ****. They are deleting all our complains in their forum, and locking our complains, this is soooo frustating. I wish I had never spend a dollar in random control I feel they have cheat us, and I thinking in some legal actions to get my money back, but I know these things are difficult, any other people in my situation?”

    – thanks.

    See this:

    http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=43040
    http://www.cg-node.com/showthread.php?t=10740 (spanish)

    I think that there are plenty complains right now about it, i dont kow why from RC denny all this, and then they lock and delete all the complains..

    It seems that they are “digging its own grave”.. in this way, but perhaps they will dont last much mor time so…

    regards.

  • Pablo

    Yeah. Arion is total shit, but this is just a first step for RC crew. Lets see what will be in future.

    Now i am fully move to Maxwell becouse i am LightWave user and Fry has realy shitty connection with LW. =( *sad*

  • Matej

    dude.. Rob Jones
    I dont think this is RC mistake.
    I think you dont know how to use fryrender. and man. I’m using arion and it’s magical. 🙂
    it’s only your foult that you spent that much money on “nothing”. sorry man.
    matej

  • Dreamcube017

    I just tried the Arion demo yesterday and it crashed BEFORE I even installed it… How’s THAT work?

    I finally got it installed, and it was rather laggy. I saw a LOT of nice features, but it was still pretty laggy… while Octane is MUCH quicker. What gives with that? Maybe I have to upgrade my GFX drivers… We’ll see, but Arion’s well… not acting as expected. (Windows 7 64 bit 4GB RAM GTX560)

  • fudi

    actually I just try fryrender just do for the some testing purpose .n after do little trial error n explore the behaviour of the setting of the material n feature I feel in love with this…so far I didn’t found any unsatisfied thing using this engine although maybe there’s alot of thing that uneasy and not as simple as vray (as my current engine) but its a minor and there’s a way to trick it out.. n I love the output of the image output. easy photo real..

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