My buddy Dejan swings by and blows my mind with a render of this badass American muscle car, all done in Blender with Cycles. Free software, free render, and it looks damn good. I’d tried Blender before, but the UI was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded, and I didn’t have the patience.

But this render sparked a challenge. Could I recreate it in Octane and see how it stacked up against Cycles, especially in terms of speed? Octane’s where it’s at for that. Materials were a breeze, took maybe half an hour. The concrete floor with puddles? A bit trickier, Octane’s mix materials are a bit of a pain. Background? Just a quick matte painting. Total rebuild time? Roughly an hour.

We rendered it with direct lighting and diffuse algorithms, and damn, Octane was twice as fast as Cycles. But hey, gotta give credit where it’s due, Cycles held its own for open source. The image quality difference was barely noticeable, maybe Octane was a touch rougher, less digital, more raw.

All in all, a fun experiment that proved you don’t need fancy tools to get killer results. Sometimes it’s just about pushing boundaries and seeing what you can create.