Throughout 2024, industry-standard applications increasingly embraced the radiance field method known as Gaussian Splatting, with many introducing initial implementations or expanding existing support. Software like Houdini, DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, Unity, After Effects, V-Ray, RealityCapture, and Unreal Engine made significant strides, solidifying Gaussian Splatting’s presence across creative industries.
Now, OTOY’s OctaneRender has emerged as a new heavyweight in the hyper-real realm of Radiance Fields, thanks to its Gaussian Splatting support in the 2026.1 Alpha release. Although Octane’s approach shares some broad similarities with V-Ray, it also comes with its own unique capabilities.
OctaneRender 2026.1 Alpha has support for both Gaussian Splatting and Neural Radiance Caching. Notice that the second one is not a type of NeRF and if you need a reminder why Neural Radiance Caching is quite interesting, I suggest reading through my article on Google’s Flash Cache. Additionally, In light of the recent NVIDIA announcements at CES, Neural Radiance Caching is getting support through DLSS 4. It will be quite interesting to see what additional functionality and use cases this brings to the Octane pipeline.
OTOY has also been laying the groundwork for deeper integration between 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and traditional geometry workflows. While the current Alpha release supports standard .ply files, future updates are likely to include compressed formats and Scaniverse’s .Spz files, broadening compatibility.
Importantly, Octane fully supports the hallmark view-dependent effects of radiance field methods, powered by Spherical Harmonics bringing that hyper-real presence to captures.
Some of the ways that OTOY’s Octane implementation differs from others is that theirs is fully path traced, instead of using rasterization. In terms of performance, a ray-traced approach is naturally slower than a rasterized one, but you gain all the benefits of physically accurate ray tracing. Gaussian splats can contribute to scene lighting, appear in reflections and refractions, and cast shadows on other objects—capabilities that aren’t always available in rasterization-based pipelines. If you’re concerned about render times, consider adaptive sampling or enabling sub-sampling in the viewport, both of which can speed things up during look development.
Because Gaussian Splatting typically assumes a black background, you may need to disable environment lighting in Octane and enable the alpha channel in the Kernel settings. It’s also helpful to add an Output AOV layer configured with black as the background color. This setup ensures that the rendered splats appear correctly.
It’s worth noting that some limitations remain in this Alpha release. Currently, Gaussian splats are always rendered on top of volumes, and they cannot receive shadows from regular geometry (though standard geometry can receive shadows cast by splats). Render layers aren’t fully supported yet, and network rendering is off the table for the moment. Nevertheless, OTOY appears to be making swift progress, so these constraints may shift as the software moves from Alpha to a more polished state.
While this is still part of the Alpha for 2026.1, things appear to be rapidly moving at OTOY for the integration of Radiance Field methods like 3DGS. Octane is a paid software and currently costs $24 a month or $19 when purchased annually. Learn more about Octane’s Alpha, here.
Disclaimer: All features mentioned here are based on the OctaneRender 2026.1 Alpha release and may be subject to change in the final version.
