Blender Render + GPU Acceleration

Hello,

Why isn’t Blender’s internal renderer as good as Octane or VRay?! :mad: It’s so slow and bad, who uses it anyway? We need unbiased, physically correct results and not this ancient s**t that’s closer to CryEngine than Avatar! I’m angry.

Just kidding. But after seeing the results that real-time renderers produce nowadays it’s hard not to stop and think why so many Blender users spend their valuable time watching slowly moving buckets instead of setting up lights, editing textures or doing something more productive. I’m not talking about these ‘real-time’ progressive renderers like Octane, SLG, Arion etc. but the renderers that give results as good as Blender Internal with interactive framerates.

Take a look at MachStudio Pro (http://www.studiogpu.com/) for example. Yes, the results of course aren’t photorealistic but closer to animations like… Sintel. FurryBall for Maya (http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/) looks even more impressive with really nice looking faked indirect illumination. And this comes from person who absolutely hates the typical ambient occlusion look.

With all these excellent external renderers out there: biased Yafaray, unbiased LuxRender, really promising Mitsuba and all the commercial software, i simply don’t see any reason to use BI. I assume that I’m not the only one and apparently there’s been a lot of discussion about the subject. So if I was to make one suggestion considering the future of Blender’s internal rendering, that would be huge speed improvement by taking this whole new approach.

And I didn’t even mention Blender’s game engine yet. :yes:

errm…

Mach studio Pro: $3,999
Furry Ball LIGHT: $299

They are very nice, but while I wait to win the lottery I’llk stick with BI or SmallLuxGPU. BI has its problems, but as with all things its a tool, you can do anything you want if you have the skillz to use it correctly.

Try another 3D app that fit your demands ! Go for the expensive ones, don’t buy something too cheaper.

Blender has in the list of things to do a revision of the renderer, but not before some months because before that it has priority to have Blender 2.5 stable with the same functionality 2.49 had. Much work ahead for developpers.

Personally I find BI to be very flexible, especially in the sense that I know that anything I can do in Blender will work in BI. GPU acceleration will come soon enough, and there’s not a lot preventing us from using SLG/Octane until then.

Of course it almost goes without saying that render engine features are probably the hardest to write.

Something I’d like to add before this thread turns into war.

First of all I’m not saying this must happen anytime soon, there’s indeed more important things in Blender’s development. Of course, I will use Blender even if its internal renderer wouldn’t be updated ever again. It was all just a suggestion that I hope people would consider as a possibility to improve the quality of their renderings.

Obviously I’m not the biggest fan of the way BI currently works. No real GI solution, slowish raytracing, mediocore results that probably could be done with the real-time renderers that I mentioned in the first post. Which, of course, are out of my budget. But it’s not like they have any top secret state-of-art technology that would explain the high pricetag.

Let’s take MachStudio Pro for example. I don’t believe it’s that different from exporting a scene from Blender and importing it to CryEngine. It’s just that MachStudio is a moviemaker/studio and make things a lot easier when it comes to setting up materials and correct lighting.

Instead of trying to compete with the most used renderers like mental ray, VRay, FinalRender or these new GPU-accelerated ‘rt’-renderers like Octane and Arion, it would be interesting to see BI taking a whole new route. Let’s forget about indirect illumination using pathtracing that other renderers are already good at and speed up rendering by highly optimized code that game industry have used for years.

Well maybe it’s wrong to say that it is BI that should be changed, this could be a whole another engine or simply Blender Game Engine that also works as a renderer. Or then simply a stupid idea in another forgotten thread in Blender Artists Forums. :slight_smile:

One question, have you actually seen the scanline renderer in 3ds Max? xP

That is the default one that Autodesk developed for Max originally, Mental ray and Vray and all those other nice render engines are just plugin renderers for Max (except for Mental ray which got intergrated) just as Yafaray and Luxrender are for Blender. The original renderer sucks for almost all 3D applications except for maybe C4D which actually have a pretty powerful render engine.

BI is actually even far more powerful than Scanline for 3ds Max is.

That being said, yes I agree that it would be nice to have GPU acceleration for Blender’s render engine (after getting proper GI of course) but I think that BF should make Blender more plugin-friendly rather than focusing on making their own stuff perfect. All the commercial packages do it so it should work for Blender too :slight_smile:

Well, not everyone is making content to be rendered. IE game assets. No need for anything but the internal.

rttwlr, everyone knows how bad is BI.
You don’t have to state the obvious.

So be patient, it wont be fixed soon, but someday it will be…

Yeah, and in the meantime you could try learn how to create amazing stuff dispute BI’s flaws (check gallery, there’s actually a lot of people who have succeed )

If you want physically correct rendering from Blender, check out LuxRender. they have a very good Blender plug-in and can make excellent images. If you want it faster, then try Yafaray, which isn’t physically correct, but is much faster.

while we talk about integration of other engines via an export function
makes sense, but I see two problems:

  1. OSS engines come and go
  2. not everybody has the money for commercial products (After all Blender is more used by non professionals)

and 3. what happens to all those additions Blender got lately or in the past?

stress texture
particles fur
smoke system
material/texture nodes

Could those be integrated so easily with VRay, Yafaray, Octane, Thea, LuxRender?

I am not sure how it is today but some years ago most of those effects were done in Max via Plug-ins.
I am not sure how those are integrated and working with Mental Ray, VRay, or Renderman (Maya).

If Blender focuses on fast animation but would improve the raytracer speed and continue the Render Branch
they would already provide some reasonable improvements.

I would not throw away the internal engine at all - may declare the focus on what BI should be for.

But to be honest if somebody does a lot of product rendering, a render box or a good card and Octane
provides a dream tool for a designer or architect. The speed and feedback is unmatched by any other
system.

Truly with hardwork everything is possible - but when you make money with this type, time is money.

Neither Luxrender nor Yafaray (or any other renderers in existence) are really “physically correct” in the true sense of it - they are, however, physically based. Both Luxrender and Yafaray have “unbiased” (as in path/bidir/ppm/sppm) and “biased” methods (as in classical photonmapping, AO, Whitted/direct lighting). Yafaray’s photonmapping is indeed faster and probably more mature than Lux’s, while lux’s path/bidir modes are equally more mature than yafaray’s equivalent at this point in time.

(Caveat; I’m a lux dev)

V

6 posts and trying to sell proprietary solutions to an open-source app. I feel some desperate astroturfing…

Check out Sintel and tell me Octane would be able to complete it in time with significantly better GI-look and without its usual shortcomings in texture size and excessive DOF to try to minimize it…

yeah, rough interactive previews are nice, but getting a final render without grainy looks is another thing. 1+ hours per frame render is unacceptable for many animations…

Where’s Endi when you need him?

Where’s Endi when you need him?
See?
I mostly agree.
Please post some renders , build some scenes, do something anyway, talk about it later.
BI is definitely not the best renderer but it works. Lot of users in zbrushcentral keep asking “is this blender? how?” “why don’t you try 3dmax etc” But I love it, waiting for a better re builded one. All other external renders are rather pointless here. Stay with BI, ask for a better one, be creative.

3 posts being in the don’t change anything mind set?

Your guys arguments are not really the best either for those
who are interested in GPU things.

Not everybody does also animations.

People have different needs - why do you think there are so many
render engines / technologies out there?

Just a thought.

thread title: Octane> fast?.. not so sure…

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112506&highlight=octane+render

The videos sound as biased as the apples to apples approach as well as Brads PC and GPU rig show.

In particular what he dramatically fails at, as most people in that thread, is that there are 2 different 3D industries.

I am curious when people finally understand that.

CG 3D motion is not 3D object shot.

Of course do CPU system have some advantages and so do GPU systems.

You just need to pick the one you need.

Why is this so complicated to see???

Again the spontaneous orgasm by the mere mention of unbiased rendering or GPU rendering. I haven’t really followed the development of Yafaray, but Yafray couldn’t do motion blur, so that was pretty useless for animation.
I think the GPU rendering is the 21st century version of the shiny chrome ball on a checker board, because that’s all I’m seeing… although utterly impressive, but they just all renderings of different specular reflectance models. Nice motion blurless sports cars animation, shiny Buddha, frosted glass Sanford Bunny, but that’s it for GPU rendering.
I’m impressed if skin, hair and fur could be rendered through GPU. GPU is cool, but far from being a replacement for BI.

@toontje dude you need to come out of your cave more