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Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 16:39
by ActionArt
Mathaeus wrote:actually I couldn't stop to play for whole one weekend...
Me too :D

They seemed to have really gained some momentum.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 16:46
by ActionArt
Kzin wrote: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.
Just playing with Blender where you can easily switch between CPU and GPU and GPU is drastically faster for previewing. You're right it takes time to get rid of the noise which reduces it's usefulness for final renders but wow, is it nice when you're setting up a scene which to me is most useful. I don't care if it takes all night after that but just not while I'm sitting there!
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.
True. But couldn't that concept be implemented in one render engine (MR)? Weta just happens to use Renderman but Nvidia helped develop PantaRay so they have the code and they own MR so...put the two together?

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 16:56
by gustavoeb
Accelerating area lights, or ao, with the gpu on existing renderers is not such a big deal because there is no actual shader evaluation in those cases. Since in theory anyone can write theire own mr shaders it is not pratical to run that through the gpu.

When you talk about mimicing the pantaray workflow, that goes in the complete oposite way of workig interactivly since there are many passes and all. The only actual reason for them to work in such a way is to use raytracing on really huge datasets... there is no reason for such a workflow on less demanding projects (read gazillion polygons).

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 17:08
by ActionArt
gustavoeb wrote:When you talk about mimicing the pantaray workflow, that goes in the complete oposite way of workig interactivly since there are many passes and all. The only actual reason for them to work in such a way is to use raytracing on really huge datasets... there is no reason for such a workflow on less demanding projects (read gazillion polygons).
Could this not be done internally/automatically as one pass though? Since there is no shader evaluation, why would this interfere with custom shaders?

All I know, is that calculating area lights eats up a LOT of time for me so it would be significant I think.

Just have to wait and see what happens I guess...

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 17:36
by Kzin
ActionArt wrote:
gustavoeb wrote: All I know, is that calculating area lights eats up a LOT of time for me so it would be significant I think.
how many lights do you have in your scene? did you use falloffs? how many samples per light you use? are you using the physical light node with the treshold option? it accelerates the rendering alot in scenes with more lights. not as fast as with MIS but this will come in the next version.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 18:02
by ActionArt
how many lights do you have in your scene? did you use falloffs? how many samples per light you use? are you using the physical light node with the treshold option? it accelerates the rendering alot in scenes with more lights. not as fast as with MIS but this will come in the next version.
I was talking more in general over a number of different projects but typically I use only 2 or 3 area lights, sometimes only 1. For the aviation projects I don't want any grain at all so I have to use fairly high samples per light, usually 5 or 6.

When possible I use Holger's very nice area light node which is significantly faster but if there are 2 or more lights sometimes I run into a bug where the shadows are black and blotchy where the two light shadows overlap.

I haven't tried the physical light node, thanks for the tip. I'll give that a try.

It's just an observation that there is a drastic hit in render time when area lights are activated so any improvement in that area would be most welcome.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 21 Aug 2012, 18:44
by gustavoeb
ActionArt wrote:Could this not be done internally/automatically as one pass though?
wont help, as it still slow. the ONLY reason why they do it is because they have insane ammount of geometry
ActionArt wrote:Since there is no shader evaluation, why would this interfere with custom shaders?
you mixed both of my answers:
1. there is no evaluation of shaders in ao and shadows
2. shader evaluation is (one of) the (propably impossible to overcome) bottlenecks in transfering MR to the GPU

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 01:10
by nuverian
With every development and support going to Maya and every other third party support not going into XSI, droppping from XSI or half implemeted in XSI, it is tempting for someone to finally move away from XSI. And the obvious next step is moving to Maya.
Thinking of this better though it might not be a good solution as well. Autodesk might buy a new software next year and move all the good stuff in their new baby and suddently Maya becomes another XSI in terms of development lagging back, just like Max is slowly doing. Then what? Oh well..move again I guess?
The thing is that people in the industry have to wake up (me included) and move not away from one software or another, but rather from AutoBot as a whole, to other healthier companies, bacause I recently feel like someone is grabbing me from my balls (greek phrase, but you got the point).
You know what, I hate this feeling and who wouldn't, so give me break or gracefully unplug yourself.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 10:10
by Nizar
With every development and support going to Maya and every other third party support not going into XSI, droppping from XSI or half implemeted in XSI, it is tempting for someone to finally move away from XSI. And the obvious next step is moving to Maya.
Thinking of this better though it might not be a good solution as well. Autodesk might buy a new software next year and move all the good stuff in their new baby and suddently Maya becomes another XSI in terms of development lagging back, just like Max is slowly doing. Then what? Oh well..move again I guess?
Reading Luceric comments I understood AD make plan for the next five years or more. For the next five years Maya is AD focus (with the mysterious maya FX project). What can buying now AD on the market? the only software they can buy is Cinema 4d and/or Lightwave, houdini is not for sale like Modo (either are private company). Anyone would like to leave Softimage for Cinema 4d or Lightwave under AD "development"? I trully think no...

So, I don't like it and I don't see so many happy users on maya front, but seems Maya is the winning horse and you can bet on it.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 11:41
by Maximus
Ther is really no winning horse under Autodesk horse, my guess is in few years other softwares will compete fully with AD products where nowadays they might lack.
AD is doing the same mistake Mental Images did, sitting in their old glory while other software houses keep growing, untill they wake up one day and be like "oh shit.."

You just need SideFX to take a look into make modeling and rigging more accessible and flexible and AD is going to get smashed bad. Same goes for Cinema 4D.
And considering those 2 software houses, its a really plausible future.
Watch it.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 12:37
by Nizar
Agree, but rumors (and some info is more than a simple rumor) talk about Maya development in two direction, videogame (project Skyline) and VFX (maya FX, due the name I guess is a VFX oriented project), also AD has the Excalibur project for 3dsm (exist more?). So they are not stationary (only in softimage side... no rumors, no "secret" project)

IMHO, they don't see in Houdini or Cinema a real menace for their businesses, their users base is consolidate so they can look to other market where competitor are more strong (videogame field? No one product in AD portfolio in this field (I mean something like Unreal Engine or Crisis)

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 13:24
by Maximus
I remember pretty clearly Ken Pimentel admitting how Cinema 4D was growing and kinda "treatening" 3ds max, and he said they were working to make max stronger.
The difference between AD and other software houses is simple. AD is unable to provide good updates in short time, so you have to wait years, other companies are more productive, fast, dedicated, and this is a winning key, most of this is because AD made a fuckin mess with their softwares, they didnt care since start so after all this time all the bugs, mess and things they had to fix before are coming out all of a sudden and all together.

I am always quite amused on how many people underestimate Modo or Cinema 4D, main because of their lazyness to try them out.
Then you have people saying "omg i tried to rig and animate in Cinema 4d and was a nightmare, that software is shit", well why dont you try to do Archviz and work with dwg in Softimage?
Cinema 4D is not made to compete with maya animation/rigging system, but give it time. Meaningwhile it just shines on all other departments, from pure graphic, to motion graphic, to advertising, product design, architecture, and even animation vfx. So yeah it quite seem like people are just too lazy to try it out.
Do a simple test, open c4d and import a 150mb hdri file and drag and drop it everywhere from shader diffuse to environment, and see how much time it takes to load, then do the same in Softimage. I can assure you there are countless of those performance/workflow things. Even more evident. You can see here the difference between a modern and well written application and another that is left untouch without updates and bugfixes.

You cant pretend to compete with modern things without update yourself to being modern. There is a moment where you will just fall back, happened to Mental Ray with Vray, and its gonna happen again, its just normal. AD is simply fucking up on every front.

It always depends and come down to what you need to do, but beside that there is a ground where the whole toolset (software) grows.
The ground cinema/houdini/modo has is way more modern, faster, intuitive, updated than Autodesk products. Which leads them to just have to add toolsets to compete fully with AD, while AD have a crap ground to work with and stack on top bought toolsets, producing a gigantic mess.

Starting from the workflow, the interface, the ease of use, the drag and drop system, the multi project options, there are a lot of things that just work out of the box in cinema/houdini/modo where in AD is just a fucking mess. When i look at the "whishlist" from softimage, most annoying things are about solid ground, things that werent fixed/updated since years. Workflow problems.
Interface, UI. You have always time to add a toolset or even buy and integrate a plugin, but what AD seems to not understand is they have to work on their ground, and this is what will make difference in a long run, because as you saw Cinema 4D had an awesome ground and they just keep adding tools on top of it without a single problem, same goes for modo and Houdini, and even Blender.

Time will tell, but i can already see whats happening, its quite clear.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 14:24
by Kzin
Nizar wrote: also AD has the Excalibur project for 3dsm (exist more?)
the current max version is xbr. 2014 will be the end of xbr developement then the max core is rewritten/overwritten/whatever or lets say its the final step of xbr developement (which does not mean the developement stops). and yes, its a bit lame compared to the xbr idea video presentation some years ago. i think max is missing the studios input that maya has.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 14:29
by Kzin
Maximus wrote: I am always quite amused on how many people underestimate Modo or Cinema 4D, main because of their lazyness to try them out.
cinema is not ready for high end work. as soon as you start to work with alot of data, textures are geometry, cinema is slow down alot. that slow that you switch back to max, maya or xsi. alot of deformer? forget the speed, its unusable not because it will be slow, also the ram usage is exploding. but cinema is not done for these kind of work. their customers dont need this, so its good placed on the market.

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 14:51
by iamVFX
Nizar wrote:(videogame field? No one product in AD portfolio in this field (I mean something like Unreal Engine or Crisis)
Actually no, Maya heavily used by the artists in gamedev industry for modelling and animation, custom engines are built for real-time rendering and custom game logics. Some VFX companies, for some unknown and weird reasons, still use Maya also. I guess they wrote a tons of their shit a long time ago and now can't change the pipeline

Re: How rendering should be

Posted: 26 Aug 2012, 16:23
by Nizar
iamVFX wrote:
Nizar wrote:(videogame field? No one product in AD portfolio in this field (I mean something like Unreal Engine or Crisis)
Actually no, Maya heavily used by the artists in gamedev industry for modelling and animation, custom engines are built for real-time rendering and custom game logics. Some VFX companies, for some unknown and weird reasons, still use Maya also. I guess they wrote a tons of their shit a long time ago and now can't change the pipeline
Customize maya like sort of realtime engine ala crisis? :-o
the current max version is xbr. 2014 will be the end of xbr developement then the max core is rewritten/overwritten/whatever or lets say its the final step of xbr developement (which does not mean the developement stops). and yes, its a bit lame compared to the xbr idea video presentation some years ago. i think max is missing the studios input that maya has.
So this is excalibur? :) Poor 3dsm... :D

Maximus@ I well know modo, I like it, rendering is so simple and intuitive, a real joy to work with but cannot substitute softimage strong and consolidate modelling tools (I found some annoying bugs in last release), and with simple scene lag too. In particular the workflow is a bit too slow in many area. Rigging and animation cannot be compared and I think, due how slowing they archive the actual CA, they cannot compete with the actual softimage feature before 3 or 5 years (or never, actually I studying facerobot and found it great).

Cannot say nothing about Cinema, only I see a very happy user base....

The software impressed me is blender, is incredible how fast they archive great result and in some area is very great (modelling is very fast and rigging is simple and effective). I wait the result of the last google summer of code (viewport FX (more fast and strong viewport perfomance), precision modelling tool (a set of new tools and snapping), dynamic retopology (sculpt like dynamesh), GUI improvment and some improvement on cycles side)