I have been able to import an environment and create realistic lighting rather quickly by using the power of GPU rendering. Paired with its ability to create instances of geometry, it makes it easy to render a megacity environment in half the time. One issue with this is the clutter that can be made with connecting nodes.
If you have high resolution images, it does a remarkably good job at resizing and resampling. It has to have something to work with, so I recommend it only be used on good quality images. On four to five megapixel images, I don't think it works as well as on my 20+ megapixel photos.
Octane uses GPU rendering so it takes advantage of the video card.
It gives you a good selection of options to tweak and refine your model rendering.
It can use 3D instances so it doesn't overuse computer resources.
There are plugins that can be incorporated into other 3D packages for rendering.
Octane is particularly inexpensive compared to other 3D render packages.
You are able to copy certain sections of nodes in order to create different iterations of the same environment or model. For example, changing the lighting or camera features.
Topaz always responds to my questions in a few hours or a day at most. They've been able to explain their answers and give detail I needed to complete my work. Their instructions are quite clear and easy to use. I haven't had to reference any third-party support sources to get answers.
Although both have their pros and cons, Octane is far less expensive and it allows for more control over the geometry within a scene with better lighting and camera controls.
Since they aren't direct competitors I don't expect PaintShop to hold up to a specialized piece of software. PaintShop allows you to resize but it's not intended to resample as well as Gigapixel AI.
