This is not a flame or anything but it seems like a lot of new rendering features in the past years do not work with some common raytraced effects (reflections and refractions mainly), cases in point.
-The release logs for SSS state that the effect will be incorrect in raytraced reflections if they’re outside the camera view (haven’t seen anything since that removes that limitation).
-The strand render developed for project Peach will not work with raytracing period
-The new ability for AO to work with bumpmaps is not seen behind a raytraced transparent object or in a reflection of any kind, bumpmap detail with indirect lighting is also not seen.
-The effects are not taken into account when calculating commonly used passes for use in the compositor like the normal pass.
Are the Blender developers adverse to making everything work with the common raytraced effects used by pretty much everyone on this forum? Do the developers expect that to use these new features and make them work with everything in the scene you must use simple Z-transparency and old-school environmental maps?
I guess if you look at the open movies you would see why such features wouldn’t work with common raytraced reflections and refractions, as there’s not so much as a reflective marble or a refracting object in any of the open movie projects which seems likely to include Durian. (there is the stream in Big Buck Bunny, but it’s not obvious whether or not it’s actually reflecting the grass alongside it)
Perhaps something to consider for the art for code project as well, as such lack of development towards making some of the major features work with reflecting and refracting objects will still hold back the renderer no matter how good the Durian improvements are, there’s also the fact that it seems unlikely these methods will work with volumetric objects either when the Durian movie is complete.
I may be wrong here, but I think the problem with creating new raytracing features is that the BI is old. So, adding new features to it is a major challenge. So, I think that once the new rendering system is done, then quite a few problems will be solved. But, I could be wrong. And I probably am.
I also noticed that glossy reflections seen through glass are not glossy anymore, animating entry into a room by opening a glass door will look downright strange, what with glossy reflections on the floor going from hard to glossy and all.
I wanted to add a bugreport for this but I forgot.
have you seen cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Blender’s raytracer is just slow try yafaray in direct lighting mode and using its AO and compare. I believe v-ray is also a speedy renderer.
One question:
Does it render your Blender scenes as done, or has one to re-create all the Materials and textures within the final renderer?
I ask this because i have been getting mad after these external renderers, few years ago, because of that.
I think its your workflow not external renderers that is at the root of your problems. Most have their own shader and material systems that are not the same. If you are using v-ray, yafaray,Luxrender or whatever make that choice early on and create materials for that render engine.
If you are converting an old project than you just have to bite the bullet and convert all you materials.
It always helps to settle on a render engine very early on in a project. Creating your materials using BI is a waste of time if you plan on using something else to render.
Won’t 2.5 literally allow the Vray plugin devs. to replace all the panels containing BI settings with Vray settings? I thought I remember seeing a screenshot of 2.5 containing panels with Vray settings instead of BI settings, as if Vray was Blender’s native renderer instead of BI.
Anyway, this thread mainly concerns the Blender Internal renderer and the call to remove the limitations I described in the first post.
I was suspecting AND fearing to get this answer… What i really love is having a complete package to deal with. I might be a little psychorigid… but this is the main reason why i could never work with apps doing modeling only…
Okay, needing to have a good bumpmap visible in reflections I was deciding to scrap the use of the new method for that scene and use nodes to “develop” a method that looks better than the old 2.4x method.
3 days in and I finally got something that looks decent, note I’m not modifying the source code, just treating the built in nodes as a visual language for creating a bumpmap.
Which brings me to the idea that more nodes could be added to make it more in line to a complete visual programming language for shaders so artists can create needed shaders if there’s no dev. available to hardcode those shaders into Blender.
namekuseijin - that is the Joy of Yafaray (and any modern, fast raytracing engine). If you have a decent raytracer and a relatively modern computer, you don’t NEED a renderfarm! I’ve not used V-Ray, but from what I’ve heard, its significantly faster.
I rendered this clip on a dual core in about an hour.
The thing is, if you have any kind of family, or even some understanding roomates, you can have a renderfarm. There are a number of packages now that will turn your home network into a renderfarm if you do 30-60 minutes of surfing to find out how it is set up.
Just to note, I successfully copied the new algorithm (though having slight differences) via material nodes and now I have 2.5-style bumpmaps in reflections, you can do lots of things with vector inputs/outputs and the related data.
Wow, talking about a hijacked thread, everybody’s talking about V-ray
Anyways, Blender seems to have a hacky outdated render engine. To more complex it gets by adding new feature, the greater the chance for render anomalies. I hope that the upcoming render engine recode will make the renderer robust, scalable and easy to use.
Many out there wish for this or that paper to be implemented in Blender, but like some devs once said is that implementing it is one thing, but how it works with other functions makes it darn difficult to implement.
you took the words out of my mouth, Blender’s ray tracer is slow it has been sped up but I still find that if you start using ray mirror materials with glossy reflections or try and get soft ray traced shadows you take a performance hit. But the are plenty of alternative renders that you can use with blender both commercial and non-commercial So in a way there is choice. So perhaps people should try multiple tools to get the result the want. With the new 2.5 api working with external render engines should become easier.
Many years before yafaray even came into being I’ve had the joy of povray – the true joy of waiting hours for a reflective sphere over a checkered plane to complete in 640x480 or lower resolutions. So, believe me: I’m from the raytracing camp and am just playing devil’s advocate by spilling the same old animator’s arguments against it.
In any case, it’s still slower and you know it. Trying to impress anyone with a raytraced scene without any reflections, refractions or indirect lighting won’t work.
of course you take a performance hit by using glossy reflections (multiple rays per surface-hit) and soft shadows (multiple rays to get that penumbra). And that’s in VRay and Yafaray too.
Dragon, your solution is as hackish as the core Blender render. :yes:
If Yafaray and V-Ray aren’t fast enough for you, then there is no way that Blender’s old, knackered, broke-down raytracer is going to magicallly become your perfect solution.
For animation, you are best faking it.
There is MOSAIC and there are loads of ways of getting it look good and cheat with BI (sans raytracing).
Or you could do what Endi did and go the Open GL route!
did you get that part right about me playing devil’s advocate?
BTW, what happened with Jaguarandi’s speed up to “Blender’s old, knackered, broke-down raytracer”? It was even up to 100x as fast for certain scenes than the older builds…
Bingo!
Unless, of course, you have a spare renderfarm. You know, a true renderfarm with hundreds of top machines rather than just mom, pops and junior’s machines linked together.
You realize that not even Pixar uses raytracing that much, don’t you? Here’s an interesting link and reading the linked user comments is enlightning too for other points of view:
One of the main issues with raytracing is flickering from frame to frame, which only goes away with far many more samples, ie rays. Not a problem if you got top notch raytracers AND huge renderfarms. Even with all that, top-notch industry animations still may get frames that get renders in the range of many hours.
