How rendering should be

General discussion about 3D DCC and other topics
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ActionArt
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by ActionArt » 21 Aug 2012, 03:43

Kzin wrote:area light shadows will be alot faster because of the new importance sampling in 3.11.
I was just thinking of Weta's use of GPU acceleration for area lights on Tin Tin. Looks like Nvidia had a big part in it. That would be useful but highly unlikely it will be a part of SI in the near future.
take a look at emfliud and the ba volume shader which is voxel based.
I have. So far they're not what I was hoping for and certainly not fast. Also (for me) very confusing and difficult to set up. Volume rendering just seems a natural fit to use the GPU on. I haven't tried the new Fury yet so I will at some point.
i agree on iray, alot of users using it for fast previews but progressive rendering would do the same.
ad has stated that they are not interested on iray integration in si.
Progressive is still CPU based though and not exactly fast. In Blender with Cylcles the GPU mode is blazing fast in the viewport even on a old GTX285 like mine. I find it very aggravating that AD doesn't want to get Iray going in SI.

I guess I should make it more clear too that I don't mind MR in the final render process, in fact I rather like it as it's so flexible, it' mainly the working and preview area that bothers me the most and the fact that a solution is sitting right there (Iray) and all they have to do is hook it up is the most maddening part.
Last edited by ActionArt on 21 Aug 2012, 05:22, edited 2 times in total.

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Maximus
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Maximus » 21 Aug 2012, 03:52

The reason why AD doesnt want to implement iRay is mostly due to the work behind it, as it was said many times, taking care of a render engine is quite a job and effort, i have no idea who is now set to this task but the development of Softimage is all focused on ICE, i cant see them swapping time/development/resources/money into taking care of the rendering, this never happened since quite a while, and this is the reason why we are at this mess now.

They rather focus on adding ICE nodes than havin the render engine works properly and with all the features. Not counting that the implementation from AD always lacked of many things, and came also with wrong default parameters which was never fixed, showing quite the lack of knowledge by them on Mental Ray. Reason why who develops a render engine should also be in charge to implement it. But this is another story, AD found on their hands a product they were totally unaware how it works, and it showed by implementations trough those years.

Dont expect to see any news on Softimage rendering anytime soon, AO in gpu? its gonna end up like iRay, not implemented and so on. Bottom line, they dont care about Mental Ray anymore, i am pretty sure in Beta testing no one uses it anymore. Also might as well fix the framebuffer before even attempting to implement something. Those are things and problems that are going on since years and never addressed. There is only one reason for this, they dont care. There is no excuse for some of those things not to work not being integrated, not being fixed after all those years. But hey, they keep taking ur money.

Nice job with the HQ viewport.

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ActionArt
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by ActionArt » 21 Aug 2012, 04:02

Maximus wrote:AO in gpu? its gonna end up like iRay, not implemented and so on.
No kidding. MR will do a half ass job of developing it and AD will never get around to implementing it.

Whether AD likes it or not, Iray is getting the Lion's share of the effort at MR so if they had any sense they'd get with it.

The only way AD will start to care is if competition (especially free competition) leaves them in the dust. But they won't notice or care until several years later...if then.
But hey, they keep taking ur money.
Not for long.

Kzin
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Kzin » 21 Aug 2012, 08:12

i understand that gpu rendering is what people wants but keep in mind that mr is for vfx work and gpu is not that flexible then cpu rendering at the moment. because of that, mi goes 2 ways, mr and iray for the moment. there are developements to get over the problems on gpu, so lets see what the next years will happen.
and i dont think gpu rendering is much faster. i am playing aroung with octane render, its great and fast for what is does, but 1080p noisefree renders also take 8-20 hours on my gtx580 for more complex lighting situations.

wetas pantaray solution is complete different. weta renders all the arealights with pantaray, bake it and using this as lookup in renderman. so they using 2 renderer, with renderman a custom solution with all their stuff. i think that only works in a bigger pipeline. i cant imagine how this would help me for example to get faster results. it would be a mess to work with such tools for smaller shops. the interesting thing with pantaray is the amount of data it can handle on gpu. i am pretty sure something like this will find its way into iray. the last update goes more in the production direction. i know it would be great to have this in mr, but at the moment other things have more priority because they are more critical (the whole flexible bsdf stuff and the gi).

ad dont know what to do with mr, thats true. its a big problem and i dont know how this will end.
the alternative is to get string options as soon as possible for xsi so ad dont have to do that much in the future and the user can use the features he wants.

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Nizar
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Nizar » 21 Aug 2012, 09:53

ActionArt wrote:I recently tried Blender briefly along with Cycles and I now feel we're in the stone age with rendering in SI. I dread learning yet another major ap but it sure seems tempting so far.

I imported a large .obj file and it loaded in about 1/2 a second (SI took over a minute). The viewport seemed at least as fast as SI and rendering was a joy. I will be investigating further, but it's pretty impressive. They're gaining ground fast.

What disappoints me most is SI could have easily had something similar with Iray but instead wasted their time with this wretched HQVP. I've tried many times to use it but it's utterly useless. The scene translation or whatever it's called is so slow it's laughable. It would have to be 50x faster to be any use at all.
Yes, cycles is nice too, but is half baked, and many features are not implemented and are only beta (i. e. cycles cannot rendering particles). Actually you can have fast result with GPU, but the big development is under CPU, and they will have, in a year, a fast rendering CPU without memory issue (GPU will be used, if I understood correctly, only for preview purpose), blender developers affirm GPU development is too complex and with too many limits so they started from the beginning cycles like a hybrid cpu/gpu. The viewport preview is very fast (IMHO many steps forward for quality and speed than HQV) , but in opengl is very poor, they have a google summer code project (a totally new rebuild of opengl code for the viewport following the new opengl 2.0 standard) and in blender 2.65 viewport FX will be ready to rock.

I think blender must be respected, sometime I read caustic or hilarious comments about, many think it is not at par only because is free, or the common thought about blender is a not well implement software due to his open source nature where anyone can put his hands for adding this or these other feature. All wrong, blender is one of the most coherency e well structured software out there, his development beginning before maya, and has different paradigms, but it far different from agglomerate plugins like 3dsm because blender foundation has a strong control all over the process (and the process going fast and strong like a train)

I astonish about how fast and user friendly is blender development (and all they are free users...)
And things arent going to change since SI is officially a maya plugin now.
Officially Maya plugin? Are sarcastic or is a reality?
IMHO the idea of selling softimage with maya was a good idea (I prefect understood is a open woods in every xsi user pride)

SreckoM
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by SreckoM » 21 Aug 2012, 10:09

I think that SI future is more guided towards game industry, same as Maya (look new DX11 viewport), that is reason why HQ viewport was built. It is not important what render engine you have the most important thing is to have viewport similar as possible to game engine output. I think that SI is now oriented to eastern market, and as far as I am familiar with that they use SI mostly for creating gaming assets, correct?
So I am not big optimist with MR and SI also.
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milanvasek
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by milanvasek » 21 Aug 2012, 10:42

well, i think it's a good thing that SI team doesn't spend too much of it's limited resources on Mental Ray. Almost all SI studios I know already use Arnold or Vray or 3delight. So it's better to focus on other things and let these 3rd party developers take care of rendering, have instant support, many releases and fixes within a year etc.
I know that many freelancers can't get access to Arnold, but Vray looks promising as well and I believe version 2 will be really good with RT and volumetrics... There are several gpu renderers available too if you are into that kind of stuf... So who cares about MR? :)
Milan Vasek
ceramic artist & softimage fan
http://www.milanvasek.com

SreckoM
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by SreckoM » 21 Aug 2012, 10:46

I said something similar on MR forum, about most of studios using other render engines with SI nowadays ... man I almost finished in jail ... So take care about what are you saying :D
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Maximus
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Maximus » 21 Aug 2012, 11:42

The main problem with switchin from MR to another is the time you invested in it, the fact that you are forced to buy another product from a company that doesnt give a damn about updating things they have implemented. We are talking at boundaries of logic here.
You dont give a damn about MR? Beta testers dont use MR? You dont update MR? Fine, just remove it from the software and cut down the price.
Its not a matter of days to switch to another render engine despite the frustration you will have cause you have to learn everything again, especially when you encounter problems.

Also the fact why no one uses MR anymore in SI is also an AD fault, not Mental images one, If the engine was implemented perfectly 100%, i bet more people would use it.

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CiaranM
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by CiaranM » 21 Aug 2012, 12:02

ActionArt wrote: I have. So far they're not what I was hoping for and certainly not fast. Also (for me) very confusing and difficult to set up. Volume rendering just seems a natural fit to use the GPU on. I haven't tried the new Fury yet so I will at some point.
Volume rendering can be very memory intensive, especially if you're rendering several different types of data (density, temperature etc.), so maybe not so suited for the GPU?

Kzin
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Kzin » 21 Aug 2012, 12:42

Maximus wrote: Also the fact why no one uses MR anymore in SI is also an AD fault
perhaps we should be more exact here, which users switched and why? which jobs they have to render? which renderer they are using now?
problem is that everyone is writing this without to give some more infos.

Kzin
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Kzin » 21 Aug 2012, 12:49

SreckoM wrote:I said something similar on MR forum, about most of studios using other render engines with SI nowadays ... man I almost finished in jail ... So take care about what are you saying :D
you throw in a general statement from your limited view which is not true at all and you was corrected ( btw, i did the same experience for the people i know).
problem is that you dont awnser anymore like alot of people which comes in the forum, bash mr and goes away. dont know why they dont defend their meaning. if you write this, name the companys, what they do and WHY they switched. thats the important point, the WHY. the mi developer reading this forum more often then you think, they discuss about it. but that all makes no sense when you wrote a simple line of words which helps no one.

mr sucks? why it is sucking. ;)

Kzin
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Kzin » 21 Aug 2012, 12:54

CiaranM wrote:
ActionArt wrote: I have. So far they're not what I was hoping for and certainly not fast. Also (for me) very confusing and difficult to set up. Volume rendering just seems a natural fit to use the GPU on. I haven't tried the new Fury yet so I will at some point.
Volume rendering can be very memory intensive, especially if you're rendering several different types of data (density, temperature etc.), so maybe not so suited for the GPU?

thats the point, the massiv amount of data used in todays feature films. i think most people underestimates this alot. the tech demos from nvidia are nice, but these are extrem low res without details and small in scale. my advice is to do some tests with fume, what you need to get some nice volumes and you will see how much resources you really need. the idea of using the gpu is right away from the table then.

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Mathaeus
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by Mathaeus » 21 Aug 2012, 14:24

Maximus wrote: Its not a matter of days to switch to another render engine despite the frustration you will have cause you have to learn everything again, especially when you encounter problems.
yeah, first divorce is pain :) - I'll never forget my fanatic days of..... Pov-Ray :). Next divorce is a pain too, but not that much....

SreckoM
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by SreckoM » 21 Aug 2012, 15:23

Kzin wrote:
SreckoM wrote:I said something similar on MR forum, about most of studios using other render engines with SI nowadays ... man I almost finished in jail ... So take care about what are you saying :D
you throw in a general statement from your limited view which is not true at all and you was corrected ( btw, i did the same experience for the people i know).
problem is that you dont awnser anymore like alot of people which comes in the forum, bash mr and goes away. dont know why they dont defend their meaning. if you write this, name the companys, what they do and WHY they switched. thats the important point, the WHY. the mi developer reading this forum more often then you think, they discuss about it. but that all makes no sense when you wrote a simple line of words which helps no one.

mr sucks? why it is sucking. ;)

I really do not have will to elaborate what was my point in that post. But honestly you think that I am under false impression that major portion of SI studios switched to Arnold or 3Delight in last several years?

@milanvasek
Can you elaborate your statement, you might have more trustful sources than I do?

And why they switched question, honestly it is not my job to do that, let them do research if they need answer on that.
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milanvasek
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Re: How rendering should be

Post by milanvasek » 21 Aug 2012, 15:45

SreckoM wrote:
Kzin wrote:
SreckoM wrote:I said something similar on MR forum, about most of studios using other render engines with SI nowadays ... man I almost finished in jail ... So take care about what are you saying :D
you throw in a general statement from your limited view which is not true at all and you was corrected ( btw, i did the same experience for the people i know).
problem is that you dont awnser anymore like alot of people which comes in the forum, bash mr and goes away. dont know why they dont defend their meaning. if you write this, name the companys, what they do and WHY they switched. thats the important point, the WHY. the mi developer reading this forum more often then you think, they discuss about it. but that all makes no sense when you wrote a simple line of words which helps no one.

mr sucks? why it is sucking. ;)

I really do not have will to elaborate what was my point in that post. But honestly you think that I am under false impression that major portion of SI studios switched to Arnold or 3Delight in last several years?

@milanvasek
Can you elaborate your statement, you might have more trustful sources than I do?

And why they switched question, honestly it is not my job to do that, let them do research if they need answer on that.
well, i'm not sure it's a right thing to talk about specific studios. i feel it's kind of internal matter.
but i worked on 3 animated feature films in last two years and two of them were Softimage+Arnold (the other one was Maya+3delight).
here on SI-community is also some thread about Arnold where you can see commercials from The Mill, Glassworks, Psyop etc. I'm not saying that they are not using MR at all anymore, because i dont know if they do, but you can clearly see Arnold being used more and more...
Milan Vasek
ceramic artist & softimage fan
http://www.milanvasek.com

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