Hi all, I'm one of Indigo 4's private beta testers and thought I might be able to bring some clarity to some concerns raised here.

For all of you that have problems with rendering (crashes, screen coming out black, etc), please make sure you have the latest GPU drivers - Indigo 4 is unlikely to work without recent drivers. If the scene is actually rendering but comes out black, try Reinhard tonemapping and see if that makes the scene visible. If you're still having problems or errors, check the render log window from the dropdown menu to the right and consider sending Glare a bug report along with your hardware and software specs.

Concerning Indigo being stuck in the beginning with Kernel builds - make sure you update your betas continuously because they're working towards minimising the time it takes and how often they happen.

There haven't been any claims that rendering performance is better on AMD cards. In fact, initial benchmark results suggest the opposite may be true, the best rendering performance has come from Nvidia cards, more specifically from the Maxwell generation. Older gen NVIDIA cards can expect good performance as well, though you will probably want to use something like 660Ti or better to get any significant increase of performance over Indigos regular CPU rendering. The only minor limit with Nvidia cards right now is that the total texture size must be lower than 25% of the total VRAM amount, however the devs are looking at working around that in the future.

I wouldn't worry too much about Indigo 4 not being CUDA - Indigo 4 doesn't support CUDA because they don't need to, with OpenCL. There has been beta tests by Octane power users, one if which has said that Indigo 4 renders "Incredibly fast" and that the release is "very exciting!". The different rendering engines are of course difficult to compare, but test rendering comparisons have showed very favourable results for Indigo with a lot of room for further improvements. 

About Indigo being a suitable animation renderer or not - it's true that there have not been to many professional animations done so far as it has rather been considered a very high quality stills renderer and found its niche there. There are of course exceptions to that, examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3erlUfylFAE
http://www.polygonmanufaktur.de/schiffskabine.html

With the new, faster rendering the devs are however eager to get into the animation business properly and lots of further improvements in that department can be expected. 

Many thanks Oscarj. Very relieved & happy to read your comments. The sample animation is awsome and it would be interesting to know how much hardware and time would be needed to render similar work with the 4.x release. The iClone community is both time & resource constrained so the ideal solution should be able to offer decent (what does that mean?:unsure:) results, within acceptable timeframes (like what..?:unsure:) and with fairly minimal hardware resources (like iclone recommended hardware - at least I can be more specific on that one). Texture size compatibility with NVIDIA will be essential for iCloners since the best cards for iClone (best technical match) are NVIDIA cards.  

Thanks again and welcome to the RL community forum!

Thanks, oscarj, for your comments. It is encouraging to hear that the Indigo developers are getting serious about animation. Hopefully in that regard there will be specific testing that includes input from iClone users,

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For animation work, I still look forward to Reallusion making use of shared/common resources that don't change with every frame.  I've done enough programing to be certain that it wouldn't be a difficult change for them.  That, along with improved Indigo rendering speeds, could be interesting.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
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Just to correct any misunderstandings.. the beta tester actually confirmed, albeit very positively and diplomatically, that indigo is fatally mismatched with iClone. I thought it was obvious but apparently not everyone got it. Having indigo as the sole renderer is bad news for iCloners. We need a "plan B" that is already proven for animation and optimally utilizes iClone friendly hardware: e.g. Octane. That is the bigger picture.

Remember: It makes sense to improve our odds of getting the rendering right. We can only gain by having a choice of 2 rendering plugins + iclone Native PBR renderer.  If you haven't voted for Octane already @Feedback Tracker, now is the time. Don't get distracted by the theoretical debates. :)

Hmm, no I'd say that's your own conclusion. :) Indigo runs just as well on modern Nvidia GPUs as on AMD's, and was actually chiefly developed on GTX 970s. That Indigo, unlike Octane, runs great on AMDs and CPUs as well is just a bonus. 

An interesting fact is that Octane for a long period developed an OpenCL version of Octane for its v3 release, but eventually gave up on it. They are now going try to develop a CUDA emulation that can run on other platforms than NVIDIA, which will be interesting follow.

One thing I'll definitely agree with is that it's always better with choice. Octane is definitely ahead in the animation department and the iClone - Indigo plugin does not seem to be working very well. Had I, for whatever reason, been an iClone user I would have been just as eager for more rendering options as you. :)

I have the RT Plugin and I have to say, that I'm more interested in seeing Iclone's new renderer than I am with Octane or Indigo. It's not that I don't like either of them. I have used Octane extensively and Indigo not so much, but enough to know why I don't like it for this purpose. The reason I feel this way now is that game engine video is how Iclone started. It's one of it's strengths.I think now that we know a new internal render is on the horizon, that it's best to wait and see what we're getting. A lot of these concerns could be rendered academic if the new Renderer is a beast.

I guess I am/was of two minds. I wasn't aware that iClone was close to completing an improved native renderer supporting PBR until a few days ago.



So if that works out, that would be great.

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Further research suggests that we need an *biased* raytracer for animation... like VRAY to give a good efficient balance of speed & quality when rendering animations.

V-Ray RT Information