OTOY

OTOY is the rendering technology company behind OctaneRender, a spectral GPU path tracer sold as a standalone application and through DCC plugins for more than 20 host applications, Cinema 4D among them. OTOY showed Gaussian splats in the OctaneRender 2026.1 Alpha in January 2025, making it one of the first commercial render engines to treat splats as a native primitive, and Cinema 4D artists gained experimental splat support inside the Octane C4D plugin with the 2026 Alpha v1.7.0 release in September 2025.

Octane path traces splats rather than rasterizing them, so splats contribute to global illumination, appear in reflections and refractions, cast shadows onto other geometry and can be relit alongside conventional geometry. View dependent color comes from spherical harmonics, which Octane supports up to degree 3. The 2026.1 beta added SPZ loading and export, splat clipping primitives and native macOS support, and the final Octane 2026 release in November 2025 imports PLY and SPZ, works with Nerfstudio and Polycam output and integrates the Marble world model from World Labs.

Point releases since then have hardened splats as a production primitive. Octane 2026.2 fixed light leaking through splats, splats rendering invisibly under the PMC kernel and a splat info AOV fault with depth of field. Octane 2026.4 added SPZ v4, reduced splat GPU memory and fixed a CUDA error that broke scenes above 30 million splats, along with corrections to how spherical harmonics load from PLY files.

Octane 2026.4 extended its Neural Radiance Cache to macOS 15 and to network rendering. The Octane 2027 roadmap OTOY announced alongside the 2026 release includes direct export of traditional CG scenes into Gaussian splats and 4D neural objects.

Octane runs on Windows and Linux with NVIDIA CUDA GPUs and on macOS with Apple M1 or newer GPUs. As of 2026.4 the minimum NVIDIA driver is R555, or R572 for GeForce RTX 50 series cards, and the macOS floor is 14.5. Octane is sold as the OctaneStudio+ subscription at 23.95 euros a month billed monthly or 19.99 euros a month billed yearly, which bundles DCC plugins for more than 20 host applications, Render Network access and unlimited network rendering.

Octane rendered the dynamic splat performances in A$AP Rocky's Helicopter music video, where Evercoast's volumetric captures, exported as PLY sequences, were sequenced in Houdini with GSOPs and relit in Octane for the final frames.