Octane Kernels
Image courtesy Lewis using new Photon Tracing kernel. Open image in new tab for full 1920 x 1480 resolution
There are five major rendering kernels associated with Octane.
Direct Lighting - The Direct Light kernel is used for faster preview rendering. Direct Lighting is not unbiased and will not yield photorealistic results, but because of its speed, it is ideal for rendering animations or stills, depending on the project's demands.
Path Tracing - The Path Tracing and PMC render kernels are the best choices for rendering photorealistic images. The increase in quality comes with the cost of increased render times. Path Tracing may have difficulty rendering scenes that use small light sources, and may not render proper caustics well. In these situations, the PMC render kernel is the better choice. Testing renders using each of the render kernels is the best way to determine what kernel is the best choice for a given scene.
PMC - The PMC kernel is a custom mutating unbiased kernel designed for GPU rendering. Rendering with PMC creates physically accurate lighting and caustic effects. It produces the highest quality result, but it can take the most time to render, depending on the scene.
Info Channel - The Info Channel kernel evaluates scene data and renders it as color images to use in post processes for compositing.
Photon Tracing (New in 2024) - The Photon Tracing kernel is designed to render caustics approximately 1000x faster and with less noise than the existing PMC kernel using a novel GPU photon mapping and path guide approach.