CG General: a diagnostic add-on that finds what's wrong with your scene before you render it

Resources Released Add-ons and Extensions
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CG General Unlit_Render
CG General Unlit_Render1920×1080 1.82 MB

CG General Render
CG General Render1920×1080 1.79 MB

I’m a solo 3D artist, and I just launched my first Blender add-on after building it alongside a full time job. It’s called CG General, and I built it around one idea: diagnose first, treat second. It doesn’t touch your scene on its own. It tells you what’s wrong, explains why, and lets you decide what to fix.

There are two tools in it so far.

Triage runs about 98 checks across performance, geometry, materials, lighting and scene organisation, and tells you exactly what it found. Not “your scene has performance issues,” but things like “Coffee mug, Subdivision level 3, 1% of frame, 1,032 to 66,048 faces at render.” Findings are graded by severity so the ones that actually matter don’t get buried under a long list of minor notes.

Lighting Doctor renders your scene, analyses it, and suggests specific fixes, which light, what angle, what distance, with reasoning attached. Nothing gets applied automatically. Every suggestion is Apply or Skip, so you’re always the one deciding.

More specialist Doctors are in development, and there’ll be more to come.

Triage is on Superhive as a standalone, fully local version with no account and no AI, for anyone who’d rather keep it that way. The full suite, including Lighting Doctor, is on my own site.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/triage

Happy to answer anything. This is very much a one person operation, so if you try it and something’s off, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

The Fridge

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Note that this is not just a commercial addon, but one with an AI token subscription.

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“Consultations” (lol)

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There’s something almost charming about AI bros trying to sell artists tools.

It’s like a man who never did any cleaning in his life buying his wife some meaningless cleaning gadget that is just going to impede her progress.

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Isn’t this the point of rendering preview playblasts? Are y’all not just watching your playblasts and looking for problems?

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Triage: https://youtu.be/Exrl0i0WLjE?is=lxncAWzZ9eswPLId

Lighting Doctor: https://youtu.be/_LCrRWFDweo?is=A0YFu92ys8gBR07v

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Well honestly, yeah I guess sometimes you can just run your playblasts but that’s not what this is for. Things usually start to become fuzzy when youve been staring at your scene for the last few hours trying to adjust the lighting. You’ve seen slightly different versions of the same setup and everything kind of looks okay and your brain turns off and you can’t really tell what’s off anymore.

Either that or you’re just new to Blender and haven’t really developed the eye for figuring out what’s wrong. Maybe you know something is wrong but you don’t exactly know what.

Basically what it does is it replaces the fatigue and the blind spots that show up after you’ve looked at your scene too many times.

If you already know what’s wrong with your scene just from viewing the playblast then that makes sense. You don’t need the Lighting Doctor. But most people don’t have that kind of certainty and that’s the gap this fills. It basically gives you a second set of eyes on a scene if you are a solo artist who doesn’t have anyone to rely on for advice.

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No subscription. For Triage the AI is an optional layer. and you can top up credits as needed. For lighting doctor its much more valuable to use the credits. I plan to make the future doctors not rely on the AI credits system as much to make this more accessible to everyone and reduce the anxiety of needing to top up. Hope that helps.

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But what are the credits for if everything is running locally as you state on Superhive?

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The whole premise of that before and after image bothers me a lot. I think the idea that lighting can be fixed here is missing the point completely. It’s a tool in communication. One lighting communicated one thing, another lighting communicates another. So how can it be fixed? How can you just completely ignore the story an image is supposed to tell without even thinking about it at all? It’s the same as fixing something you say. Imagine you want to tell your friend a story. Let’s say you went on holiday came back and then met your friend and you are telling them how your holiday went. But I can offer you an app that fixes that. It’s an AI app that generates short stories. Now when you meet your friend to tell them about your holiday instead you read them a story about ancient land of warriors and dragons. It’s much more interesting. :laughing: It ignores completely that you actually wanted to tell another story. This situation is completely absurd, isn’t it? Well, it’s the same with this light doctor, isn’t it?

:man_facepalming:

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The After image also isn’t lit well, the intensity of the volumetrics removes any points of focus. The sharp tangent between the yellow light and the blue light looks awful. All the leading lines take you to the bottom right corner, but there’s nothing there.

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Well, running sanity checks on scenes can always come handy even though it’s also tied to the kind of projects you’re doing… Is there a list of those ~100 checks available somewhere ?

As for the AI assisted art feedback, it’s quite a funny concept… Indeed it’s good to get a fresh look on your work, but in a professional situation it’s something you get from an art director or client. In personal projects you can show that to relatives. I truly hope anyone has someone in their life that can take 5 minutes to give their impression on the work. Or some form of connection in the blender community that can give a more expert feedback.

I get the AI trend, but I don’t see the benefit of trading meaningful and thought through interactions for completely artificial feedback that probably miss the point of the purpose of the image and big picture of what someone is trying to do…
Compared to sanity checks that are actually used in production, this feels completely unprofessional and I’m not even sure this can help beginners as it’s not clear how much they can make out of that AI generated information.
Anyway, for the sake of example, can I post some images of my own here to see the kind of feedback I would get ?

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I’m glad you asked. Triage on Superhive has no credits. No AI, No credits. Just one time pay and play.

The Triage version on cggeneral.net has the optional AI layer as an extra as well as Lighting doctor if you’re interested in those.

It’s the same product but no AI on Superhive.

Lighting Doctor is only available at cggeneral.net due to some superhive policies.

I’d love for someone to test and let me know if it’s something they would like to use.

Many more ‘doctors’ in development.

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Actually, you’re right in one thing. Lighting is a topic which is very subjective. It could look good to one person and bad to another.

The idea is not to replace the whole mood or lighting setup to show a completely different scene ( like your dragon story). That would mean all lighting would converge to one standard lighting setup, which isn’t the case here.

Yes, the thing you are talking about is the INTENT. What exactly is the artist wanting to portray. Maybe you know what you want in your head but can’t translate that to lighting in blender.

For this reason exactly, I’m working on an intent driver. Something that would tweak the lighting to something you were envisioning. But good points.

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Well, I used to think that way , but now I would say that what is subjective is how you like or not the result, as it goes down to personal taste, culture and life experience.

But it’s possible to analyse how creative choices serve the purpose of an image, how they convey the story you want to tell, how they relate to reality. These for the most part could be objective.

There are many different ways to tell a story, you might like or not the story, or how it’s told. But it’s easy to objectively judge if it’s clear to understand or not, if it sounds right or not, depending on your culture on the subject, if it’s told in an original way or common to many stories. It’s also possible to find narrative schemes that are used or not, well or badly executed… Even if all that is probably not as a clear cut as in programming or technical things.

For instance there are a lot of very simple mistakes in the example image you posted, they are easy to catch, once you see them it’s hard to deny they are wrong, but apparently the AI didn’t mentioned them…

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But it actually is. That’s what AI does. Everything looks the same AI slop kind of way. And when you take advice from AI, that’s what you end up doing. Because it only knows the average. It’s just a bad idea.

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There is a whole list of the checks it does on the Superhive triage page. Also on the cg-general website.

Yes, you’re right. Its a good idea to just get someone close by to check. And you can do that. But there’s not always something there. And esp with lighting where you need many iterations, it can sometimes be bothersome to get someone else again and again. It’s just something that may be useful to some but not to others.

I’m always glad to receive constructive feedback or if you have any ideas that could improve on this. Something people find more professional or useful?

If you would like an example feedback I’d be happy to run your lighting through it. Image only wouldn’t work though as it also calculates where the lights and objects in the scene are so that it can accurately place lights. It would need the blend file which I don’t think you’d like to provide. But I’d be happy to run it if you want.

It isn’t just an image analysis or render feedback it gives. It’s much deeper under the hood.

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You’re right. The thing is that lighting is actually quite mathematical and there exists a whole science behind lighting theory. Its the mood or emotion that the artist is trying to invoke which is what is subjective. There is good and bad lighting - objectively. But.. doesnt mean the good lighting is what you wanted. It might be technically correct but not creatively.

There is no ‘correct’ in art anyway. Its just a perspective.

But this would help to atleast get the technical part right. You dont have to apply all its suggestions, nor are you stuck with what is applies. Creative direction is always gonna be in the users control , and thats what matters. But i think its nice to see a slightly diff take on lighting at times.

Ive tested this on my own scenes. Things ive created and thought they were finished and posted. But it will still suggest stuff. Some I dont like and I undo. Others are actually not too bad and i never caught in the middle of the project and vision i had. So it can vary.