AMD's (ProRender) Plugin for Blender

How to Create Smoke Volume Effects in the Plug-In for Blender ?
I saw this but any other help is very welcome.

So you saw it, but what have you done? Any images or scene files, steps you made???

I follow that tutorial step by step, but the look is not the best. How can i improve any render ?
Thx

Hey carlos. Can you post what you have? Please attach the scene file.

cornell-box-rpr-volume.zip (137.8 KB)

Thx !

I’d love to see this option flourish as cycles ON macOS has been quite hobbled by apple’s decisions to deprecate OpenCL. Prorender’s metal support makes it the main viable option for accelerated rendering on macs.

Where can I go to check for the 2.8 release? And do you accept people for beta testing?

https://community.amd.com/docs/DOC-2183

They’re looking for testers! The plan appears to be full integration into Blender 2.8. Lookdev in EEVEE then switch over to RPR for final render (and on macOS that means using Metal 2 for really fast GPU support - whereas Cycles no longer has GPU support on macOS). It’ll obviously be a second option to Cycles on other platforms.

Do be aware this is an early Beta release but it’s up and running already. Feedback and crash reports are welcome on the above website. AMD are definitely listening to users and working really hard on this. It’s going to be awesome.

RPR in 2.8 is supporting the built in EEVEE/Cycles material nodes. No need to re-build your materials in RPR anymore! They’ve also made their own Uber 2 available if you’re not bothered about using EEVVEE.

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Cannot enable the addon in 2.80

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\username\Desktop\blender-2.80.0-git.0f135f80f271-windows64\2.80\scripts\modules\addon_utils.py", line 351, in enable
    mod = __import__(module_name)
  File "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\addons\rprblender\__init__.py", line 18, in <module>
    from .engine.engine import Engine
  File "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\addons\rprblender\engine\__init__.py", line 88, in <module>
    assert pyrpr_init(bindings_import_path, rprsdk_bin_path)
AssertionError

It is a very early beta! One that is not installing on Windows at the moment, I’m sure they’ll fix that soon. :slight_smile:

It installs fine on macOS.

Well that is 1 of my to hopes for ProRender. Now that it is in 2.8 I hope they add Deformation Based Motion Blur for character animation. Once that is in place this will be a Great Option for rendering.

So much for Blender being doomed on Mac platform

Doomsday scenarios these days, they don’t make them as they used to :smiley:

Real time rendering also a nice bonus. Me likes :slight_smile:

:slightly_smiling_face: Good news, but Eevee is using OpenGL, and Apple has also stopped support for that. Working around that with a Metal wrapper for Vulkan will take a lot more (unnecessary) time and effort.

Personally, I’ve recently sold my Mac and returned to a Windows PC. I was fed up with Apple pushing me into a corner with their crippled 3D support and demarcated policies. But I’m happy for all 3D creators on macOS. ProRender is a great renderer.

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The only crippled technology is actually OpenGL which is currently an abandonware with almost 2 years without an update and almost completely replaced by Vulkan. While before Metal we have been repeatly told that Vulkan was ABSOLUTELY NOT a replacement of OpenGL. Apparently all that has been forgotten and now Vulkan even develops of high level layer to make it even easier to use than OpenGL. Funny, I know.

So Apple did what they know best, like Flash, they gave up on dying deeply problematic outdated technology. It was essentially a mercy killing.

Eevvee depends on OpenGL because the entire GUI of Blender is OpenGL dependent and moving to Vulkan would not have been a walk in the park. Ironically its easier to move from Vulkan to Metal than it is to move from OpenGL to Vulkan.

Many 3d apps still depend on OpenGL but games and game engines have moved away for a long time now which makes around 99% of the case of 3d graphics. Vulkan would have not existed if Apple did not move to Metal. Google had to push for it because they would not able to compete with Apple on graphics department. I am talking about Android.

Also OpenGL would not have been near as popular as it was if it was not for Apple. It was popularised by MacOS(it used OpenGL it draw its entire GUI) and its mobile version, iOS (OpenGL ES was used by iOS and then embraced by Android as well). Apple is also behind Vulkan as well cause Apple is still active member of the Khronos board which is responsible for the creation/development of OpenGL.

Saying that I am not disagreeing with your choice to move to PC, its a much better supported platform for 3d graphics, especially Windows. Its a sensible choice.

But I can assure you Apple was not to be blamed for Metal, the other board members had the opportunity to avoid this situation they chose not to and Apple showed them it meant business as they did with Flash.

Of course all this technical and is much easier and convenient to blame Apple which why I am ok with people doing so, just want to inform then that Apple’s reason run way deeply than “Apple is an evil greedy company”.

I know all this, but it’s good you repeated it for people who didn’t know it yet.

Regarding Metal: it’s undoubtedly a great library, but I think Apple should have introduced it less rigorously, next to offering gradually diminishing support for OpenGL and OpenCL. In the current scenario, OpenCL for macOS wasn’t supported anymore by the Cycles developers before I knew it, because OpenCL updates had been completely dropped by Apple. I think pushing Metal in such an absolute manner is a dictatorial move of Apple, forcing 3D developers into a corner on macOS, while Apple should rather try to improve their relatively poor 3D reputation.

Just my $0.02. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yeah by “you” I mean generally, I do not know you or what you know about this.

I agree completely, I also cannot offer opinion on OpenCL , I know it has its own problem but I doubt it was nearly as problematic as OpenGL. In any case I am not familiar enough about OpenCL to offer an educated opinion. I also cannot offer opinion on Metal, I have only glanced through Vulkan docs.

Also its not clear yet from Apple what they mean by deprecation , there is a fog around the future of OpenGL , will it be removed completely next version ? None knows. On the matter of OpenCL nothing stops AMD from releasing for MacOS, NVIDIA has done for CUDA as Apple never touched CUDA. Generally Apple takes responsibility because it knows GPU manufacturers do not give a damn for anything but the Windows platform because their pockets are fill with games money.

Linus (the creator of Linux) showed them the middle finger (famous youtube video, Nvidia in his case because they refuse to work with them on the OpenGL support on Linux and good driver support) Apple Showed them their own version of “middle finger” via Metal and the fact they manufacturer their own GPUs.

Contrary to what people believe Apple although far from a purely open source company has always supported, funded and contributed to open source. Of course open source does not always means “free/libre software” which is why they do not embrace the GPL license. Most people do not even know what MacOS and iOS are exactly the same OS and that its core called “Dwarwin” is completely open soruce since the damn of time (its a fork of FreeBSD also a popular open source OS) among many other open source technologies they have invented.

In any case Blender will have to move to Vulkan eventually and already Vulkan support on MacOS is almost complete. I do not know performance wise how good it is but I am sure by the time Blender decided to give up on OpenGL it wont be an issue. There has been some discussion about moving to Metal as well, but I think Vulkan should suffice at least as far as the OpenGL stuff is concerned.

Problem is those APIs are rarely accessed directly by developers, they prefer to use game engines instead like Unity and Unreal. Unfortunately Blender cannot rely on such technologies being incompatible with GPL. This why Metal and Vulkan was so quickly embraced, the game engines updated and none even noticed :smiley:

I hoped you remembered our discussions about it in the big Apple OpenGL OpenCL topic. :wink:

You know an impressive lot about this, and I agree with you.

An ironic bit about all this is that Apple once pushed OpenGL in the early days of it.

Yeah sorry my memory makes goldfish laugh.

I dont know as much as Blender devs that have to work daily with OpenGL.

Just a note I am not suggesting that Apple invented either OpenGL or Vulkan , they merely were early adopters and contributed feedback.

PS: Yeah I tried to install ProRadeon on windows 10 it installs but the addon gives errors.

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Installed ProRender on macOS High Sierra but it crashing Blender when I try to activate it in Blender Preferences. I’m still on High Sierra because of Nvidia cards. Can crashes be caused by the fact I use High Sierra or Nvidia cards? ProRender should work with Nvidia cards to ensure smooth transition from Cycles to ProRender.