Are you know what is pre-production? Man says pre-production in the video.
Listen after 3:45 on the 2nd video.
I donāt think they went back to the shots, rotoscoped manually every actor that was shot in front of the virutal sets (because of the lack of green screen), and replaced the background with higher resolution renders. You could argue that they may have baked all the lighting in another package and imported that into Unreal as emissive (although there are examples like the motorbike demo - not from ILM - where the lighting is fully dynamic), but a lot of the shots just made it into the final movies.
āThe digital sets werenāt merely pre-rendered imagery, but game-type 3D objects rendered on the fly by powerful NVIDIA GPUs.ā
"Plus, it no doubt saves on post-production costs ā according to ILM, the technique was used in fully 50 percent of The Mandalorianās shots. Best of all, the technique was seamless and invisible in the final show. "
You are derailing the whole subject of my thread, being quite rude and aggressive, talking down to me, while Iām just trying to share knowledge here. I would personally be happy to recognize if Iām wrong and stand corrected if what you say is true, but all the information Iāve found and the first hand experience I have working in the industry just support what Iāve been trying to say, which is that realtime engines can deliver photorealistic results when used properly, knowing the caveats and strengths of the techniques.
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I donāt say anything anymore. You can believe what you want.
Sayonara.
Hi chafouin, I personally appreciate your sharing knowledge about this subject as I am very new to Blender " actual Noobie " and am trying to decide which rendering options to use. I have purchased E cycles and so far it seems a good faster way for Cycles. I have peers who are using Octane and I have been looking at Renderman. I come from the set design side where we use Sketchup to mass for construction if needed key art, 2d in PS .
I am loving the advanced modeling tools in Blender. Any suggestions? My needs are speed and easy learning curve as I am not a programmer or computer whiz, I started this when we still used pencils and paint :P.
Side note A good friend worked on Mandalorian, Anotherās now on an undisclosed Marvel effort, I donāt know for sure the details as Iām not on those jobs but I do know professionals use whatever tool it takes to meet the needs of the project soā¦
As I continue my tests (if I do, because Iām honestly discouraged to share anything anymore on that forum), I might discover new things and change my mind. But here is my gut feeling:
- You made the right choice with E-Cycles. This is the easiest to learn (a lot of Cycles tutorials out there), the best workflow (EEVEE gives a pretty good preview of materials, and Cycles X viewport is super interactive), the best integration in Blender (stable), and the fastest. I would avoid it if trying to render huge scenes as GPU memory can become a problem very quickly.
- Octane will be the best choice if you are interested in getting the most realistic output with the least effort, and is a good contender for archviz renders. Itās fast, but the workflow is slower as it is not compatible with EEVEE, the learning curve is a bit steep, itās not as stable and you are stuck with old Blender builds.
- If you plan to render movies, go with Renderman. It is the most complete render engine out there with different integrators for different situations (you pick the best technology based on your scene requirements, if you need caustics or not, etcā¦). It also has external tools that are very useful in production (it, tractorā¦), but you will have to pay for the XPU, and itās not super stable at the moment, but the support on GitHub is very good. Renderman can render anything you throw at it.
- If you want to be ahead of the curve, go Unreal 5. Realtime interactivity is what clients want, and realtime workflow is what artists always wanted. Exporting between Blender and UE5 could be better and takes a bit of time to go back and forth, the learning curve is steep as there are more things to learn about than just materials and lights, but you save so much time on everything else, and this will soon become an industry standard.
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I wanted to add my opinion yesterday, but was afraid I would just throw more petrol on the fire as the discussion seems to get more and more heated. As @EcstaticPixel already mentioned it is not about what is the best tool or software, it is about using the tooling that gets the job done with the quality and speed needed for the task at hand. One of my favorite saying when it comes to CG stuff is āIt doesnāt not have to be realistic, it just has to be believableā, and getting to believable can be hard enough sometimes. Seeing the results you and others are getting with EEVEE is truly inspiering, and makes me realize I have a long way to go with learning EEVEE, so pleas donāt get discouraged from sharing. For me EEVEE has to many limitations in many cases, but that is mostly beacause I donāt know or have enough experiance with the ātricksā needed to combat the ālimitationsā, and because of it Cycles is more efficient for me to use for now. Once EEVEE gets GI and raytracind and the game engine ātricksā are less needed, I think a lot of people are really gonna see how amazing EEVEE can be, for one a lot more people are gonna be able to do more/better animations withoute spending ages on rendering. But it is still gonna be about using and knowing/being efficient with the right tool for the right job.
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I know for sure that I will only use EEVEE as soon as they implement a better GI solution. The SSGI build from @0451 is already amazing in that regard.
I am not too picky with reflections, you can get away with a lot of cheap tricks, but of course getting raytraced reflections will be the icing on the cake.
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I will continue to look Iām not in a huge hurry I just want to make sure the path I go down is a good one since I honestly donāt have huge bandwidth for learning new stuffā¦ The free blender usage with Octane is very attractive but it does make me wonder if that will be a time limited thing.
Evee was actually the first thing I looked at as its pretty damned impressive!
These renderers that use unique builds of Blender Ecycle, Octane i think renderman? How do you suggest best use case? would it be you model and compose in a standard blender and then move to the unique build for rendering?
I am also very interested in UE5 Iāve recently come back to the film production world " got laid off by Universal during Covid " and everyone is telling me that Unreal is the way to go which makes sense to me as you can bring assets from all over into a projectā¦
Indeed, not gonna replace Cycles entirely for my part, but a lot for sure, and a lot I do in After effects I should be able to do with better quality and maybe even better speed. Ben waiting for them to anounce raytracing ever since they firs tentioned EEVEE before 2.8 came out,so I got real exited the day of the anouncement 
Exactly Elk, truth be told from my experience digital artist have always been striving to make our work less realistic and more expressive, even painterlyā¦ I did arch vis for a company for a year before the 2008 meltdown, they called it Hyper reality, couldnāt stand it, most boring work Iāve ever doneā¦
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Trying to get some more archviz buisness going here at the moment actualy, and yeah, I see what you mean. A lot of archviz is more towards real estate photo more then architectual photo if that makes sence. It is over saturated and sort of flatend at the same time, I like it more when it is more towards the realism side with some ārealisticā lighting and not all pure white walls and AO shading in the corners. But on the local market here that is probably the easiest thing to sell, and I enjoy it for now, but hoping to get the odd asignement of the more challenging/fun sort every once in a while
Renderman doesnāt need a specific build, but is right now limited to Blender 2.92 because they are using an older version of Python.
Iāve been switching between Cycles, E-Cycles and Cycles X builds without any problem. Blender files are pretty lenient for that matter, but I would still try to stick to similar Blender versions just in case (i.e. if you save your file in 3.0, itās better to stick to 3.0 and above).
If you use Blender 3.0 for modeling and then have to go back to 2.92 or 2.93 for Renderman or Octane, there might be features youāve used (like new modifiers) that will be missing/breaking. Anything that is stored into vertices/UVs wouldnāt have any problem though.
Unreal is the way to go. UE5 with nanite will allow to assemble huge scenes in realtime without too much extra work from artists to optimize their assets. This is a game changer. They are spending a lot of resources on making sure it follows VFX industry standards with USD, ACES, etcā¦
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Come on! Everybody knows that if you want real photorealistic results you should go with MS Paint.
I also found the Eevee version surprisingly more pleasing on the Porsche renders. Thanks for your comparison and such detailed pros and cons. Looking forward to the next ones.
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Donāt be discouraged by in my eyes very troll:y comments ā¦ I love render engine comparison threads ! I compare render engines all the time , itās fun. Keep em coming
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Thanks for the comparison, really good way to spot the small differences between both engines quality from an artistic point of view. Donāt feel discouraged to share more, the internet can be a wild forest sometimes.
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
I only played Gran Tourism franchise, and i donāt remember myself becoming enraged because the reflections are not fully realistic, if they look very good and the game does not lag, i am happy, while i understand in a movie some things need to look almost 100 % real, a gamer asking the same needs to buy a nasa computer.