Cycles Development Updates

General Forums Latest News
2883

I honestly can see a middle ground, if the current manual is a dictionary, then I’d wish for something like an encyclopedia. Currently a lot of the descriptions don’t even hint at what they’re used for, it lacks hints, why not even suggestions or example cases.

I’m not so sure about the process for contributing documentation, and anyway improving the manual in that direction is not (that I know of) a project sanctioned by the foundation so until it’s part of a larger effort with clear guidelines, I’m probably not contributing.

See the Arnold doc, the Houdini doc…

11 Likes
2884

Yes ! I agree with you, global CG knowledge is out of scope of blender manual. Even if maybe it can be a good idea to include in blender manual a bit more of general knowledge. But that’s limited.

That said, I also think @thinsoldier is right in the fact that’s sad that some knowledge get a bit lost over time.
Basic PBR shading is a good example. I don’t speak about you, who is someone with a really advanced knowledge, and maybe you get that prior to most people here.

But the way I saw it : Cycles was released with a set of shading nodes, and a few people really know how to operate these. Resulting in a lot of error in shading. One good example is making a plastic material by mixing diffuse + glossy without including fresnel, I saw a lot of people (me included) doing this.

Then PBR got more traction, and more people did tutorials about how to correctly do shaders in cycles, people talked about that in forums etc… resulting in a broader understanding of shading by the community.
A bit latter , Principled BSDF was released, more and more people relies on substance for texturing and learned to plug the right maps in the right slot of the principled, which is good too.

But as a result, people starting blender nowadays don’t know anymore how to use basic nodes to make shaders. Even more, they use Principled but have no idea of what it does under the hood.

And trends like these I saw a lot over the years, PBR is one of them, Linear workflow too, Filmic also brought a lot of understanding to rendering when it was released.
But because these stuff tend to be automated now, it’s harder to learn about them compared to the time when everyone talked about them.

Having a manual (or a wiki) dedicated to these fundamental knowledge could be really good to have. But as I said, it’s a lot of work and someone as to step up before it can become a community effort.
Some knowledge tend to recycles quite well, every now and then you can have a tutorial about character modeling, lighting etc… On more specific subjects, I think it tends to get lost.

What do you think ?

5 Likes
2885

Hi Folks

Anyone here know if there are plans to incorporate distances meshes directly in cycles

Similar to Vray DistanceTex feature

1 Like
2886

This is why I wish there was a community funded effort to catalog and backup such information, both as a website and as an archive of PDFs and videos in a .torrent and anything else worth trying. Link rot is a killer of knowledge and community progress and leads to unnecessary bickering based on misunderstands between generations.

2887

experimentation in absense of understanding results in nothing but memorizing a handful of numbers that somehow produced an attractive result (but often not the exact result you were trying to achieve) after several hundred hours of directionless experimentation. I know this from years of trying to learn maya in isolation before I had access to gnomon workshop and youtube. I’ve heard similar stories from people who had Blender decades ago but no internet and no friends who also had Blender or any other 3d program.

The blender manual would be an unmanageable beast if it went into the level of detail you are alluding to.

The logical organization of the manual is very good and I wouldn’t want to disturb it with full blown 8 part blog posts and 3 part youtube tutorials that contain shilling for products and sponsors. I just wish there was a place where many community members, especially the older ones, shared and upvoted things that sparked major eureka moments for them and once things get enough up votes we save a pdf of the article or download the video and put it in some kind of archive in case the original disappears. Just browsing the contents by category and sorted by upvotes and “amount of prior knowledge expected in order to understand the content” would be good. … and I think this conversation is going waay off topic now.

2 Likes
2888

Hence why I didn’t list experimentation in isolation - but included it in a list including videos, tutorials and forums such as this.

Welcome to Blenderartists…

There is nothing stopping you taking hints and tips you find on forums such as this and updating the blender manual to include them. I often find myself posting links to forum posts or threads to answer questions new members have about a solution that I know has already been posted or discussed (e.g. glass dispersion, iridescence etc).

4 Likes
2889

The do what Fweeb suggested and contribute. Enhance the articles to include the level of detail you believe is appropriate.

2 Likes
2890

I think we have a little bit of that with Nodevember.
It turned to be Geometry nodes oriented in last editions.
But editions anterior to geometry nodes were only about shading nodes.

I would say that is logical to observe such learning about Cycles, due to the way Cycles is build.
There are few shader nodes with a transparent name. Only 20 nodes in that category.

2 nodes to blend (Mix or Add shader), 3 principled shaders, 15 with an obvious purpose in its name (Transparent, SSS, Hair,…).
You can obtain a result by just playing with those. And that is what most of tutorials for beginners will show.

And then, we have 20 nodes from Inputs category to plug in mix factor or shader inputs to make things right. Except Value and RGB nodes, purpose of those inputs are far to be obvious. And the way to plug them into shader is not either. For the simple reason that they are useful in different use cases.

So, you literally have an hundred of things to explain before explaining the way to use Converter and Vector Nodes. Math node can correspond to 40 operations.

The idea of node editing of shaders is to handle thousands of cases with few nodes.

We can expect a collaborative site to handle more than an hundred of examples.
But we can’t really expect from one man to handle updates for so many cases, to triage 5 different ways to obtain same result and only pick one, neglecting the best result for the simplest set-up or the opposite.

But if somebody wants to create a Cycles node trees wiki, I think that everybody in community will like that.

2891

I remember stumbling on this 200 page procedural texturing guide, crazy amount of info and practical examples about cycles nodes: Procedural wear from A to Z in Blender

12 Likes
2892

I guess this might be it :slight_smile:
https://developer.blender.org/D15286

8 Likes
2893

Would like to see some testrenderings.I would build a version on my own,however i have not updated my build setup since a year,because the daily builds for download was most enough to me.

In the meantime there was a python and Nvidia SDK update i guess.

2894

Also Beginners guide to cycles nodes, the procedural way https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zk2mWLxdRZmNLi6uww32LvGUJUQimrPFFKaoFbZ7_Jc/edit

5 Likes
2895

@Thornydre What can I say. You guessed right :slight_smile:

1 Like
2896

I’m not sure you read that part of my post above, but I think it’s pretty reasonable to wait for project validation and coordination before starting any grunt work. Wouldn’t you say ?

2897

Nice to see this gets implemented,thanks for that.
Can you show some renderings with it?
Is a GPU update planed or is this depending on Intel?

1 Like
2898

@pixelgrip a GPU port is planned (ideally cross vendor).
The current focus lies on integrating path guiding as robust as possible (i.e., never generate worse results compared to path guiding disabled). therefore focusing on the CPU code path is the easiest.

I will add some images next week in the related path guiding task:
https://developer.blender.org/T92571

12 Likes
2899

Hi. Are there have any build to test out OpenPG with Cycles?

2900

Exactly. Not saying it wasn’t a needed addition, but if the principled shader had been there at the time, I would have never understood Materials as well as I do now. Especially PBR with some very well made tutorials from a channel I can’t seem to find anymore… something with a cat?

I think it would help if blender shipped with some more specialized Node Group Materials.

1 Like
2901

you mean CynicatPro?
https://www.youtube.com/c/CynicatPro/videos

2 Likes
2902

Yes! Amazing tutorials.