I am not sure what you are referring to exactly, though some alternatives could be found in some sort of cgfx shader configuration.
See http://blog.leocov.com/search/label/cgfx
I would argue that having a real time renderer, regardless of what application makes use of it, as part of its viewport capability is never a bad thing. This includes real time spot light shadows, AO, motion blur, AA…ect Great when mixed with animating via the timeline.
Try not to hate Maya so much =P What it does do well I would like to see in Blender. Right now it has one of the best viewport options available. I have a feeling that with blender’s game engine, it is inevitable that it will be merged with the viewport’s capabilities at one point or another.
I’ll probably try mentioning this stuff to Ton or the blender peeps if I see them at Siggraph next month. I hope siggraph can open eyes a bit. Once you are there and see where all the latest tech is, its kind of hard not to look at Blender and think “wow we have a ways to go”.
Are you talking about the game engine being merged into the viewport code? Because something like that would be rather impractical to do considering that the engine itself is a fully featured game creation environment with a lot of code specifically designed for games.
As for viewport 2.0 possibilities, it would be possible through expanding the existing GLSL code within Blender itself, it will also benefit BGE users as most of the code is shared between the viewport and game rendering systems.
However, when it comes to Cycles, Brecht has emphasized that he wants to keep the GLSL code simple because he intends for the rendered view to be the primary vehicle to preview renderings.
Not exactly. Speaking from purely a vp2.0 perspective. Just the rendering aspect. Think along the lines of Marmoset Toolbag which started from a game engine:
The capability to see diffuse, spec, normal, even displacement maps in real time…
Having aspects like motion blur, AA and real time AO would be great for visualization before animated renders as well.
Cycles is good for seeing where a render is going as well but its not quite the same when it comes to animated sequences on the fly within the viewport, or how a game engine would perceive an environment or object with all maps applied.
Eventually they will have to put some design consideration around game development and not just film and general visualization practices. The video games industry brings in more annual revenue than the film, tv and music industries combined. A lot of next generation tech ish pushing for more real time rendering capabilities. I would hate for Blender to miss out on that aspect. =)
it would be nice to have more glsl functionality in the viewport without relying on cycles. It’s useful for previs. It’s annoying having the obscene amount of artifacts I had in a previs animation render, and cycles would have taken too long to render. 2 seconds vs 2.5 minute grainy image is a massive difference for a previs animation.
I think Brechts render preview is wonderful when I am trying to use cycles, but not every project ends in cycles. And cycles cant do a lot of stuff, such as normal maps, particles, etc. which are perfect for previs.
In these cases it would be nice to have GLSL shading that updates as the node tree changes.
However, this would likely be a big project and I’m not sure if that’s a high priority for Brecht (having the idea that he first wants to complete other critical features such as performance improvements and volumetric rendering). Perhaps if Brecht gives the go-ahead another developer can work on the GLSL pre-vis, I would also note that this would become an even bigger project if you’re also improving the viewport shading for use with BI since it now involves two engines.
Or perhaps there will someday be an API that would allow users to create addons that enhance and add GLSL shading capabilities to the viewport, there actually was a GSoC project concerning custom GLSL shading for the game engine whereas one of the features was the shaders being visible in the viewport before the game starts.
I think it would be more practical to have more polys and better scene handling, than to have more GLSL(that we do have, just no SSAO, or cavity shading), but you can now show displacement, normal, spec etc in viewport. @sainthaven, of course blender needs improvement, I just want to look past the flawed alternative softwares and have better, far more diverse, and longer lasting improvements…prefer innovation to evolution…
Ah but then the question is, why not have both? Better poly and scene handling with viewport visualization. Some how it seems like some have this idea that you can only have one. It could depend on who is working on what and how many hands are involved in making the said feature, but in no way is it limited to one or the other. Is there a community effort to bring in more developers?
I am not sure what you mean by “flawed alternative softwares” and “have better far more diverse longer lasting improvements”, along with “prefer innovation to evolution”.
Flawed alternative software sounds entirely subjective. Is not then Blender flawed as well? Do we look past Blenders flaws? Is not improvement to address those flaws? Then in that case seeing what other apps, those used by the industry that matter, and finding the non flawed parts is not exclusive to the betterment of Blender and fixing its own flaws. Flaws in this case though sounds subjective rather than objective. If you can lay out specifics and why its a flaw, then a more objective dialog can ensue, revealing a much more beneficial conversation that can help blender rather than take away from it.
I was talking with one of the founders and lead 3d fx compositors a at a major fx company here in Hollywood the other day, and we were going over some of the software being shown off at Siggraph this year. We came to a few new products (including the one mentioned in this thread) and he shook his head saying they are often not worth working in because it comes out of europe (in this case france). He explained that from his experience they like to make their UI different, often for the sake of being different or their concepts are obscure and it just keeps the pros out. The ironic thing about this is that he is European. Perhaps what he is hinting at is that (generally speaking) where north american (canada & US) GUI designs tend to be more unified with each other and general PC OS design, European design tends to fall on the side of arty and obscure. This is not bad in theory but the question is then, is it effective? At the end of the day is it going to appeal to the right people? Who are the right people? Is the goal the GUI and design or what the application can produce? In game design, designers have to constantly be reminded of playercentric design principles since it is quite easy for the design to turn developercentric, which ends up failing more often than succeeding. The same concept can apply to any application which intends to be used by a target audience.
Longer lasting improvements? You do realize makes no sense. What defines an improvement? how does it last long? I would argue easy and intuitive will always last longer than the difficult and non intuitive. Improvements are often about what makes it easier, not how to do it differently. The industry only cares about easier, quicker, faster. New tech takes a long time to take over the old tech. Hell we are still using sprite based particle systems, polygons, UVs and texture maps. Blender has embraced those, not experimental alternatives such as voxels, non UV based p-tex, cloud based rendering…ect and if it were to embrace those, if the industry as a whole doesnt do it then its all for moot. Lets look at reality here, not poetry. Apps are tools, tools for making content, content that has to work with other content to create a product or result.
Innovation to evolution? Who says they are mutually exclusive to one another? What does that even mean in the context of a cg application? Reinventing the wheel is not innovation, nor is it evolution, that is one thing developers have to be careful of.
Turtle and Beast have nothing to do with Maya’s VP2. Illuminate labs products are purely offline 3rd party renderers, that have a heavy games bias in their feature set. VP2 is a derivative of Max’s Nitro viewport tech.
anyways… better viewport tech in blender would be very welcome, or the support for custom hardware shaders (cgfx/fx/glsl etc) so dev’s could write their own if needed.
Interesting, I read somewhere (will have to go back and verify) that the improvements to vp2.0 were based around the acquisition of turtle and beast. If the source is wrong, thanks for shedding some light on it. It will give me something to look up later. =)
Agreed on the viewport tech. I cant imagine using maya without a few custom cgfx shaders, which can be used to render out detail and light into a UV map for hand painted texturing. Would be great to see these options start appearing with Blender as well.
It would be great to have all sorts of candy, the question is not the “what”, but the “how” and the “who”.
If you look over to the GE guys, there’s some people doing cool stuff (like martinsh) that aren’t directly involved into core development.
These would be my “demands” for the Python API:
Full access to OpenGL drawing commands
Access to the mesh buffers
Ideally, an OpenCL wrapper, with GL/CL interoperability
A node UI api
Python is certainly fast enough drive modern OpenGL (few draw calls), but the current OpenGL (bgl) wrapper is still immediate-mode based (one draw call per triangle) and Python becomes a bottleneck.
If these demands where met, you can be sure that all the candy from the BGE people will show up in the viewport in no time, and it will probably also attract general graphics developers who want to try out new stuff.
Sorry for butting in, but what does it matter, really? If Maya has a tool set that performs better/worse than other software’s, then wouldn’t those other software packages be better off learning from those successes/mistakes?
Yes, Blender is open-source and pretty unique (not to mention seriously awesome). But, from an observer’s perspective, if it always strives to be “different” and so on, it could turn out to be more of a blaster that points both ways, wouldn’t it?
Also, for the record I find your “walls of text” very interesting, SaintHaven
Not sure why my posts bother you so much. In fact my last post had nothing to do with maya, rather is was a response to your response. If you are going to say something poetic like “preferring innovation to evolution” and “flawed alternatives”, then I will ask you to elaborate on those. Does that seem irrational? Were we not talking about the viewport just prior?
As for #2, dont you think that attitude is counter to what blender hopes to achieve? I suggest I like a few things in maya and you take it way out of proportion. That cant be considered rational. The improvements I would like to see in blender are not necessarily tied to any direct copy of another application, rather its a question as to why does it work and how can that find its way into Blender. It seems like you like to jump on my case but dont like the questions I throw back at you.
I use multiple applications, and i think you would be hard pressed to find an autodesk user that wants to willingly use software tied to autodesk, often times we have no choice. Autodesk as a corporation isnt the best, or most moral. I might not be a big fan of the corporation but I can enjoy working with their products, of which can be very good at what they do. Does that concept bother you?
Instead of nagging on me for mentioning something in maya or the discussion regarding improvements, why not just carry a normal friendly and non condescending and non biased conversation? Its not that hard to do. If you cannot do that, then yes please, put me on ignore.
lol thanks. I made them in Blender (text editor) jk!
Exactly my point, though yours is more clearly explained.
About viewport performance (we’re on the subject, after all) I have noticed that ever since 2.5x the viewport slows down more quickly than in 2.4x. Since 2.6x I have seen a vast improvement, of course, but for instance my Audi A5 project slowed the viewport down more than I would have liked. All Subsurfs were down to 1, some deactivated altogether, but even with VBOs enabled everthing tends to slow down. Still very useable, don’t get me wrong, but I shudder to think what would happen with even more complex models.
…then again, it could be my nearly non-existent knowledge of scene optimization that’s contributing to the problems
I dont think your scene optimization had anything to do with it. After 2.5 came out, I tested a few meshes I made else where in Blender and also noticed chugging I dont see in other apps. I run a rig geared towards asset creation with a 6 core cpu, 16 gigs of ram and a 560 ti, on my dell precision workstation with a firepro gpu and dual core cpu, there was even more of a slow down. I hope that with proper optimization, blender’s viewport should be able to handle at least half a million polygons if not more with no problems. We can also see this in the sculpting aspects of Blender at the moment.
I don’t know if I buy that. VP2 kinda works, somewhat, while Nitrous su# donkey #¤&k. If the Nitrous driver was a alive I would punch it on it’s nose. Hard.
Talk about missing the point. Why get angry & irritated at other users at all? Ignore them - and I personally do just that, not even using the function I mentioned.
And about me bullshittin’ every other thread, you are aware I started this one, right? Else you’re just gonna look real dumb I mean, hehe… ;D
Re. my ‘artwork’, in 3D I do ‘view-based’ (like ‘a room with a view’) clayrenders for constructors/investors. Most I’m not allowed to share and the stuff I could I wouldn’t anyway, as it’s pretty bland renders. And I’m not an ‘artist’ in regard to 3D, though I’m here to learn Blender and Cycles - I just didn’t know this was an artist only area… ;D
