appleseed renderer (now with experimental Blender exporter!)

comeinandburn · January 22, 2012, 9:18pm

Is anyone interested in makings some basic video how-tos for us mere mortals? To be honest when I exported from blender and opened up Appleseed it seemed very overwhelming.

Franz · January 23, 2012, 12:03am

Screencasts would be a very valuable addition, unfortunately we don’t have any yet.

All we have right now in terms of user documentation are the Quick Start guide for the basics of navigation and a small set of illustrated tutorials. Did you check them out? Are they helpful despite their limited scope? Are there topics you would like to see covered first?

Cheers,
Franz

comeinandburn · January 23, 2012, 6:04pm

I’d love to see the basic importing of objects, assigning materials, etc… all the basics. I know this is available in the docs but in my opinion it’s always easier to see someone doing it. I’m sure you’d enlist a lot more testers from the community by doing this as well.

One thing I’m unsure of is, is there a way to explore your scene without the use of the interactive render mode? like openGL or something similiar? I saw in the docs that wireframe can be selected through the diagnostics menu but my machine still seemed very sluggish (Win7 64bit, i7 920, GTX550i) with just a wireframe of the cornell box project. How do I select a surface in the viewer? How do I export separate render passes? etc.

thanks, can’t wait to see more development.

Franz · January 24, 2012, 10:21am

Absolutely. Doing a couple of totally-laid-back screencasts is in our short term plans.

Rendering is slow, even in wireframe mode, because the scene is actually raytraced with the same engine as for final rendering. The fastest diagnostic mode is probably “Geometric Normals”.

That being said, we actually noticeably improved response and reduced sluggishness when manipulating the camera during interactive rendering. These improvements will be available in the next alpha which we’ll try to release soonish as it contains a number of important bug fixes.

We don’t have short term plans to support OpenGL rendering in the “viewport”, because the typical usage scenario involves setting up the scene in a DCC app (Blender, Maya…) and only tweaking it in appleseed.studio. The medium term plans are more open though and proper object picking, object rotation/translation/scaling and real time material editing are considered. We’ll try to do as much as possible with the ray tracer but we certainly don’t completely rule out a fast hardware-based previz mode for quick scene setup.

Hope that answers your concerns.

Cheers,
Franz

Franz · January 26, 2012, 2:56pm

We decided to shuffle a bit our priorities and produced a couple of screencasts to get the conversation started. Here they are. More coming soon.

Please let us know what you think, and what topics in particular you would like to see covered.

Cheers,
Franz

NinthJake · January 26, 2012, 3:09pm

Absolutely GREAT to have some screencasts of it, really got me in the mood of trying it out myself

The second video is listed as private by the way so we cannot watch it.

Franz · January 26, 2012, 3:36pm

Oops sorry, fixed.

Cheers,
Franz

ejnaren · January 26, 2012, 3:41pm

Wow. Very nice videos. Quick, clean and to the cut.
This spurred my curiosity for testing as well.
Brilliant work and good luck further.

NinthJake · January 26, 2012, 4:43pm

I just took Appleseed for a spin for the first time ever, quite powerful already I must say but when I tried to bring in a scene of my own I became painfully aware of how important it is to properly name your objects xD

Franz · January 26, 2012, 11:16pm

This problem will be mostly gone as soon as we’ll have implemented picking… Right now it’s a problem, I totally agree.

Cheers,
Franz

jonathantopf · January 27, 2012, 3:12am

Hey everyone, Im Jonathan, the guy who did the videos, you can see on appleseedhq.net that there are more videos planned but if theres something missing from there just shout and maybe we can put it in a future video

Cheers

jt

Franz · January 28, 2012, 2:46am

We just released appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-11 with improved display during interactive rendering and fixes for a few annoying bugs that couldn’t wait until the next release.

Cheers,
Franz

comeinandburn · January 30, 2012, 5:39am

thanks for the videos, they were very informative and made dipping my feet in that much easier.

I must say but when I tried to bring in a scene of my own I became painfully aware of how important it is to properly name your objects xD

You mentioned that implemented picking will be added in the future which is good, especially for scatter brained creative types… naming things properly is alot to ask:)

We just released appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-11 with improved display during interactive rendering and fixes for a few annoying bugs that couldn’t wait until the next release.

Off to try the latest release.

thanks

Franz · January 30, 2012, 5:45am

Yes, we will implement picking sooner than later as it’s obviously impossible to manage objects by name only in any non-trivial scene…

Great! Alpha-11 isn’t that much different from alpha-10: we mostly fixed some bugs, but the improved display during interactive rendering is worth the upgrade. We further improved the responsiveness of the interactive display since the release of alpha-11. The new improved code is already in GitHub and will be available in alpha-12.

Our focus right now is on deformation motion blur and improved ray tracing performance. This will be available in alpha-12 as well.

Cheers,
Franz

NinthJake · January 30, 2012, 6:02am

Oh yeah will Appleseed also be able to read the .mtl files that comes with the exported .obj?

I noticed that it didn’t import any of the materials I set up in Blender which would obviously be extremely helpful.

Franz · January 30, 2012, 6:34am

We’re not planning to support reading the .mtl files since the data they provide are too basic to be of any real value.

However Blenderseed is able to translate Blender materials to appleseed materials during export, at least to a certain extent, so your appleseed project should have some materials set up.

Cheers,
Franz

comeinandburn · January 30, 2012, 6:41am

I’ve just opened the latest, alpha 11, and I wanted to share some input. This is purely intended for the betterment of appleseed from a user standpoint.

Since appleseed only accepts light emitting objects as light sources, the blender appleseed exporter should default to “export emitting objects as mesh lights”. I experimented with a light emitting plane and I was unable to find a suitable emit value that works when exported.

Secondly navigating the scene from within appleseed was still quite unusable with interactive rendering since all system resources went to the render. Is it possible to keep the interface as a separate process similar to the way blender does it? I have no idea how this is achieved but it’s a great example of how it’s possible.

NinthJake · January 30, 2012, 6:44am

Well in my personal experience material converters never work well, it is always better to set up the materials manually in the render engine you choose and for that .mtl files are great since they contain what material is assigned to which objects, that way you don’t have to reassign all materials to every single object, you can just focus on editing the materials and every object will be updated automatically.

Franz · January 30, 2012, 7:02am

Thanks. Feedback, positive or negative, is very much appreciated.

Here is the rationale (it may be flawed): in my limited experience with Blender, it appears that a lot of materials have a non-zero Emit value, not necessarily to actually emit light but rather to add a constant amount of color to the material. If all such materials are translated to true light-emitting materials, not only does the render look much different but the performances can become abyssal. This is why the default is to not translate Blender materials with Emit > 0 as true light-emitting materials. The ‘appleseed_arealight’ custom property can be used to tag those materials that should really emit light.

Do you think the defaults should be changed nevertheless?

On a side note, appleseed actually supports point lights and Blenderseed will translate Blender point lights into appleseed point lights.

I understand. This is indeed not ideal and we may eventually have to provide a faster rendering method for scene navigation, possibly OpenGL-based. In the meantime, you can change the number of CPU cores dedicated to rendering in the settings/appleseed.studio.xml file of your appleseed installation: locate this block:

&lt;parameters name="progressive_frame_renderer"&gt;
    &lt;parameter name="rendering_threads" value="auto" /&gt;
&lt;/parameters&gt;

and change it to

&lt;parameters name="progressive_frame_renderer"&gt;
    &lt;parameter name="rendering_threads" value="2" /&gt;
&lt;/parameters&gt;

if you want the render to use only two cores. Note that this will only impact interactive rendering; the number of cores used during final frame rendering is controlled by a similar parameter in the same file.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Franz

Franz · January 30, 2012, 7:08am

Interesting, I didn’t consider the usage of .mtl files for the sole purpose of assigning materials to objects. This is indeed an interesting use case and we will consider supporting this workflow in a future release.

I agree with you about material converters. We decided to make Blenderseed translate materials to provide a starting point for material tweaking inside appleseed.studio. This is by no means a definitive solution.

Cheers,
Franz