wurp wrote:

I am pretty curious to see one of the more experienced 3delight artists render your typical "vray/mr interior" in 3delight,..

Well, start your countdown and wake me up when this happend (sarcasm)

I was waiting for someone from dna or moritz to leap on that, cheers. :) that dates back to my first exposure to prman several years ago, the internal docs for that show said 'final shots need shading rate of 0.1'. even for an inexperienced td like myself that seemed excessive...

I had tried a few variations before writing up this tutorial, including emitting photons from the spotlight, and with render/write photons enabled and disabled. The renders look identical whether i cast photons or not, and the render time is about the same (38s with indirect samples on 32, shading rate 1). By 'setting the bounces to 1', you're referring to the raytrace limit in the pass settings right?

Enyhoo, here's shading rate 1, single bounce, 256 samples, about 4mins30. I also made the spotlight have quadratic falloff as recommended in another post:



Any pointers for getting point-based stuff to work? Reading through older posts implies it wasn't that straightforward from the maya gui, but a lot of those messages reference older builds of 3delight. Not sure if its changed for the latest release.

thanks for replying btw!

-matt

Last edited by matt (2008-12-12 05:04:39)

No kidding, I find that there is a lot of talk but not much is being backed up by actual images..

3delight has its place, and so does prman and all the other reyes renderers but they really don't seem to be a serious replacement for mental ray or vray etc in many cases.

boofa wrote:

elvis75k wrote:

wurp wrote:

I am pretty curious to see one of the more experienced 3delight artists render your typical "vray/mr interior" in 3delight,..

Well, start your countdown and wake me up when this happend (sarcasm)

it won't happen.  That same challenge was laid down in the pixar forum.  A lot of people said they would download the provided scene and come up with something, but a year later, nothing.

https://renderman.pixar.com/forum/showt … genumber=3

scroll to the bottom.

Last edited by daddysauce (2008-12-12 10:36:21)

Boofa is right.. Maybe we could use some useful information from Pixar's forum about scenes like this.. Maybe we should start a similar thread on interior scenes and how we could render them using 3Delight.

Hi Moritz
    I generally agree with the most things you've said. It's true that most of the free license users of 3dfm here are x mental ray users but I don't think that we are all people that expecting to push a button and boom.. "Behold, a nice living room with perfect GI!!
    Personally when I decided to try 3Delight I knew where I was getting involved to and I knew that I should study hard in literature and forums and would be hard to follow. I tried though and I don't regret it a bit. 3delight is much superior than any raytracer in most rendering tasks and gave me fast solutions that I couldn't achieve with mental ray when it comes to displacement, fur, motion blur, depth of field, programmable aov and the flexibility to achieve virtually any look I want.
    But, do you believe that anyone here looking for a solution is a lounger having no better work to do than fooling around in the forums expecting a one button solution for everything? Do you believe that we are all so dump expecting form a Reyes renderer (3Delight) to behave exactly like a raytracer (mental ray, Vray)? We already know that. I ensure you that if we were happy with mental ray or Vray we wouldn't be here wasting our time in the forums. We also know that most contemporary films are created with Renderman compliant renderers and that they are capable of producing perfect GI renders. The big difference is that most of us here are not experienced TD's like Philippe from DNeg. Unfortunately except from books and the internet there's no other way to master Renderman especially in Greece where I live.
    I understand that You and the other TD's in this forum are working hard and I don't except you to write a tutorial or anything but I think someone could help us a bit on this. Someone could point us to relative literature or anything that would help. Personally, I study RSL everyday in books and the internet and I 'm happy writing and using my own shaders, but I still can't make any shader that uses raytracing render fast. I still can't make my shaders do the right thing as you said. I don't know, maybe I've missed something. I think we're all here willing to try hard to learn more on this  but we need a starting point. Regards!

Last edited by Sifis (2008-12-13 07:03:14)

Mauritius wrote:

Hey Sifis, my reply was not directed at you but at boofa (alias cheebamonkey @ CGTalk).

If you post some of your shaders, I'm happy to have a look & comment. :)

.mm

Thank you Moritz I really appreciate this. I'll finish some tests first so I can figure out what works and what doesn't work for me before I bother you with a ton of silly questions..In the midtime if you already know any source where we could find some useful info about how to make our shaders do the right thing when called for diffuse or specular ray hits, would be great!!

Last edited by Sifis (2008-12-13 06:57:16)

I agree to a certain extent with having long pipeline workflows being counter-productive to the efficiency of the rendering engine. I've found this to be the case when trying raytracing stuff with Renderman. It's great for non-raytraced stuff but it's hard to get the speed up on say raytraced occlusion etc.

For example, there could surely be a way to simply interpolate raytraced samples to smooth out noise, but how? Write the samples to a point cache and then do some sort of custom DSO lookup? It takes a lot of time figuring these steps out. As Mauritius points out he spends a lot of time working these things out and when it's figured out, it's great but only for that one person's workflow, not for everyone using 3delight. This is the difference with Mental Ray and Maya integration because when people figure out the workflows, they can post an easy tutorial and everyone can benefit.

I don't want to stop using 3delight but when I see how much time I waste programming for ages to get simple effects and basic lighting working right, I wonder if it's worth just using Maya + Mental Ray for the majority of the work and then keep 3delight for the times when the easy workflows don't cut it.

The fake ways of doing things using DSOs and shader programming is great in terms of the flexibility, I wouldn't want to lose that but it takes time and the thing is, I know that a lot of the effects and techniques have been done before but major companies don't seem to share their methods or they use a pipeline that is hard to map to your own, like they may be using MTOR with slim templates.

Finding material online for Renderman is difficult and the documentation is sparse. I found what seems to be a really good source of documentation for some techniques here:

http://facultypages.scad.edu/~mkesson/AppNotes/

but they use PRMan again and some things like soft area shadows using multi-sampled DSMs look great but it requires a shadeop built into PRMan. In 3delight, you'd presumably have to write your own. I don't like to reinvent the wheel when long hours have been spent by someone else getting the job done already.

This is why I like the example scenes provided with 3delight as well as some of the shader source code but 3D work covers so many effects and techniques that it becomes too much to do. An individual can spend months getting volumetric smoke effects just right and then someone else comes along and they have to figure it out for themselves. In Maya, Autodesk can bundle a quick setup for it so that people new to it don't have to start from the beginning again.

The 3delight documentation is pretty good as a reference manual and it helps a great deal but as people have said already, it's all about results and the results you see from major studios are impressive. From individuals, it's mainly test renders. How many gallery pieces done on CGTalk are done using a Renderman engine? Most of the time it's the two main ones: Maya + Mental Ray or 3DS + VRay. It doesn't matter what reasons this is the case, that's the way it is unfortunately.

It would be nice to see some really tight integration between a major 3D package and a Renderman package but do they need to offer one? Even if 3delight beats others in certain cases, it only needs to be there for those cases as an extra. Mental Ray is now going to be getting developments in the area of GPU computing as the Gelato team are working on it (Larry Gritz etc who originally worked on BMRT/Entropy).

I can understand the point that people make about it doesn't have to be easy because it's understood that you need to know what you're doing to get the best of Renderman and it's a fair point. But operating systems don't have to be easy either. We could all be still using command-lines. In practice though, everyone can see how much time is saved by having simple workflows for the majority of the work you do and this is generally missing from renderman.

matt wrote:

Daddysauce has a post on his blog that I'm gonna have a stab at, see if its easy/hard/impossible to wrap it into a GUI-ised pass setup ala rfm. We'll see.

Thanks for posting that link, I had a two pass point-based workflow setup and I was happy that it was rendering much quicker than raytracing but the shadows don't come out the same and I was getting really noticeable white creases appearing:

"set bias in shader low to avoid white creases"

I'll try following that workflow through too and see if it improves. I also kind of expected the performance of point-clouds to be faster given that it's all pre-computed. A 6 minute render for ptc vs 30 minute for raytraced is ok but surely it should be extremely quick if it's just iterating points.

There are all sorts of settings you need to figure out to get the results and best performance. There's a setting in the ptc lookup called clamp or something that's supposed to get you closer to the raytraced look and it didn't improve the render at all for me.

I think that the point cloud workflow is the one needing to be detailed the most. It should allow pretty much every effect you'd need but quicker than raytracing and without the memory issues and it's a workflow Renderman renderers should excel at.

Hey Andrew,

I read your post and I understand that there is some frustration with RenderMan renderers and usability in general. There is many reasons for that but for us, integration and usability is the current main concern. We chose (more than a decade ago) to build a system that is robust first, and solve the "bells and whistles" later. It is a painful choice but one that had to be done.
If you follow the development on 3Delight For Maya and 3Delight For XSI, you will see that the user experience is getting better and better. GI and Ray-tracing will soon be as easy in 3Delight as they are in other packages.

  -- aghiles.

Sifis wrote:

aghiles wrote:

GI and Ray-tracing will soon be as easy in 3Delight as they are in other packages.

  -- aghiles.

I don't know about you guys but I 'm very happy to hear that. Thanks Aghiles!

yes.  Hopefully it'll bring 3Delight to more people as they won't have to fear as much with regards to coding and do more through the UI.   To give people who use Vray that same warm and fuzzy feeling about 3Delight, it needs to be in a way they can easily understand and impliment w/as less pain as possible.

Andrew.R wrote:

Mental Ray is now going to be getting developments in the area of GPU computing as the Gelato team are working on it (Larry Gritz etc who originally worked on BMRT/Entropy).

Hi Andrew,
I missed this nice occasion to do some mental bashing :)

So, just to clarify the truth behind the marketing spoofs that can be read in press releases and that confuse the userbase:

mental ray is NOT getting ANY development in the area of GPU computing, until very *today* not even 1 line of mr is CUDA accelerated and I do not see this happening soon.

Additionally not only Larry has left NV (and as it has been said he is now working on Sony's renderer - and BTW Sony does not use mental ray, the press release about Sony being the biggest installation base of mr worldwide is 100% fake, put up for political reasons) but basically the whole team of  Gelato has left (pissed, and they were right to be).

p