This is exactly it. He could be doing one thing a little bit differently and benefit everyone in the process.
There is this issue, and also the issue that submitting a patch isn’t just a matter of yes or no, but almost certainly involves making changes to the code - sometimes quite big changes - such that it can be merged without conflicting with other areas of development. ‘Someone else’ wouldn’t know how to do this, so it doesn’t really matter who does it, if they don’t have the skills to modify the code confidently, and develop code in a professional manner, it has very little chance of being merged at all.
Also, from what I understand, some of the patches he is using are ones which are already available on places like Graphicall, which either haven’t spiked the interest of the BI developers, of have been considered and rejected already. He is doing new work too, but this is another thing to keep in mind.
Guys, just be sure you’re happy paying for his stuff under the assumption nothing makes its way into master and you get no further builds/improvements after you stop paying. If you’re happy with that, then that’s great, I’m sure you’ll enjoy learning from who seems to be an experienced developer. Otherwise, think carefully about the choice - there’s a lot you don’t know, and probably even more that you’re not aware that you don’t know. You’re paying for his time, not for improvements to Blender - just remember that.
Why performance is different than new features available with add-ons? In both cases, a developer had to spend the time to code something on the top of the blender. Why people are not demanding from a developer, for example of MeshMashine or Auto-RigPro or Asset Management to reveal their code or marge it to the master? Same case - some functionality lacking in Blender. Why can’t E-Cycles be treated just as an add-on? Some add-ons are free, some are paid. It is his choice - if you don;t like it you don’t need to use it. For me, it is as simple as that.
Right, paying for it as just another add-on is perfectly fine. He seems to be doing fantastic work.
The point @smilebags is making is that some users might be confused to think they’re supporting functionality that’s being actively developed to be included in master.
The author does say he will submit his work, but it doesn’t guarantee getting into master, especially since he’s not working with the developers from the get-go to make sure his work is meeting their standards.
Spot on. There are a few differences between this and an addon. With add-ons there is the understanding that you’re paying for the addon, not paying for development of Blender.
Addons are also much more future proof than builds. Addons can be expected to work until another large rework of Blender, basically for all of 2.8x. Having to pull and merge, followed by build your own Blender already sucks, but there’s no chance you won’t have conflicts when merging master into your branch. You have to intimately know Cycles to be able to do anything about that.
How it focuses your workflow? Whatever version of Blender you use, you just hit render in both cases. Your workflow is the same and all files are 100% the same as those of Blender.
On top of that:
I will continue to make build as long as needed
the time and money you spare for a year with a faster rendering is still there. For a professional, the price of this build for one year support is covered in less than a month easily (the 2.7x price is equivalent to 3-4 hours of work here, the 2.8 price is only 2 hours of work. If you count in graphic card price, as soon as you have a 1050Ti or more, you get your investment back instantly.)
In a night, you manage to make the thread derail again and speak about all your fears. I reworded as you like, started a discussion with you on how to make it better. You said twice a thing and it’s contrary with a few hours in between: (exact original sentences are in the links, most of the time the post are bigger than a screen…)
“a year to release my changes is too long” then “the render farm never releasing the improvement they made is a success story”
“make a patreon” then “patreon is a paywall”
Yet you seem to never come to a really good solution so you keep coming back here to make false claim. I will not write pages just to speak about all your fears and what can happen. An asteroid may also fall on earth tomorrow and everything everyone do on earth today would make no sens, cause we are all going to die, etc… And I can’t guarantee an asteroid is not going to come soon.
And with E-Cycles as already said, any professional is going to have it’s yearly cost covered in less than a month, so even if development would stop after a year, it would have been a great time and money saver.
Oh and particles nodes, everything nodes, etc. uses money from donators since 2011 https://fund.blender.org/grants/ (right at the bottom, the first grant is about it and several following ones), yet nothing in master. So what about making a fear campaign in the BF donation thread about the possibility that some things will never be merged in master? Or do you just reserved this to E-Cycles? I know spreading fear is the new trend, but I have a better solution, just keep your fear for you, people can also find what is good for them by themselves.
I understand you may be angry that I’m bringing up issues about your development and funding practices. I will keep this short so I don’t further derail your thread since you seem to have flagged many of my recent comments.
Your quotes about contradictory statements are incomplete and have been brought out of context. You will find each of the statements in context make perfect sense and don’t contradict each other.
Grants given to BF are done such that people can work with the Blender team to integrate a change into Blender. It seems you have no intention of reporting to BF at all until you ‘submit your changes to be added’. This small difference leads to a very different outcome.
From your gumroad page:
help make Blender better. It will help me invest more time in coding instead of doing it on my free time like before. All the improvements will be proposed to the Blender Foundation after a year
Be sure your money will be used to make Cycles better
If you intend on fulfilling these promises, you need to work with the Blender developers. If you don’t, remove them.
I won’t be replying to this thread any further unless someone tags me and specifically requests me to answer a question and I feel like answering it is beneficial.
I’m not angry about you bringing issues, I’m pointing out that the risks you points are in any development, not specific to this one, yet you bring it only here.
You give the impression you have solutions, but when asked in the other thread to bring one that is proved to work, you just keep criticizing or stay on a theoretical level. The BF fund page show that intern or extern, the risk of things not going into master are there.
About your contradictory statements, I gave the link so everybody can make his own opinion, at least one other person sees like me.
Everyone coding for Blender helps make it better. If the BF uses this external help wisely is another problem. You are welcome to make a thread about it. I did everything Brecht asked for to include my patch after the funding last year, although the money was way below the level I set. But to be respectful to my donators, I did it. Now you try to make people to not trust me based on nothing, because the said patch is now in master.
If Brecht ask so, I’ll replace Cycles with E-Cycles in the statement you quoted.
I can’t think why anyone could be confused. It clear that it is a separate product and you pay for what it is said - performance in a separate build. @bliblubli said that he will send it to master after one year but it doesn’t mean that it will be merged. There are some older builds with sobol and other perfomance tricks made by many peeple. Some are free but devs didn’t want to make them into master because it wasn’t stable. it wasn’t tested, there were same problems etc. @bliblubli made a build with all those tricks and released it. It wasn’t one night to make it so he charges money for that. I can’t see any problem here.
I didn’t use the right word, sorry. But you’re right.
I will consider support e-cycles.
I have one more question: how about rendering heavy scenes with particles and specially volumetrics, where CPU is more suited. Can I expect improvements?
Right, had time to do a couple tests on the Feb build:
First quick render on the W7/GTX980 machine, renders no prob. Tried lowering the samples as per your 20% comment, can’t see any difference in my results - looking close but not microscopic inspection!
1280x720, 100%, 300 samples = 8 mins
1280x720, 100%, 250 samples = 6m 35secs
As for the Win10/GTX970 machine - it works fine! Don’t know what caused the previous issues, but this time i F12 w/ the full settings (1280x720 at 100%, 300 samples) and it just tore through it in under 7 mins (sorry, didn’t time it, was just please it was working). Thought it was playing w/ me at first, got right to the end and closed Blender, but then i noticed Windows was doing some update thing so maybe that messed w/ it, the next time i tried a render, all was good.
Edit - just for clarity, my 970 isn’t overclocked so i obviously had a different issue to the above.
You’re welcome Customers using Volumetrics seem to be very happy with nearly 7x speedup. As long as your GPU has enough memory, it’s good.
I’ll try to make a test myself with volumetric and particles, but actually those cases where it’s so fast make it hard to believe, so I keep them under the hood. Most of the time, using the manual options of E-Cycles I get 8x speedup (see the videos at about 1min per frame), but I prefer to speak only about the out of the box gains.
I’m happy it works as expected in your case Rendering 20% less sample for the same quality is always good to take. I’ll try to make it automatic. I’m looking for the right heuristic to make it work in 99% of the cases.
First, bliblubli has a coding and Blender building course which is beyond amazing.
Second, I’m a 2D pencil and paper-brush and canvas, traditional artist and not a 3D wizard like every single amazing artist on this forum.
I’m super new to Blender source coding in general and have only been doing it for a few weeks. I know a little bit on how to write 2.79 addons but not anything super complex.
What he and his course have taught me is that it is very easy to maintain your changes and keep them updated with Master branch, even on a daily basis in worst case so there is really no maintenance issue for those that know how to do it.
Even if this stuff was never put into Master for whatever reason, we can still code our changes to work in whatever the current Master branch is. bliblubli made this easier to understand than you may think and it is plain to see how easy it really is. Mind opening.
Here is what I can do with my branch.
Export an entire Blender 3D scene including cameras, empties, complex 3D amimations and sims, 3D mesh objects with pbr materials and textures along with Cycles and or Eevee render passes into a 2.5D/3D, layer based compositing software and have everything line up and to scale.
It is almost like having a linked 3D scene in two different software where renders from either software can be seamlessly composited together. This makes it a million times better for creative reasons but also for post work such as re-lighting and or materials tweaks, mask creation, id passes and just about anything you can think of can be performed in either software and things will just simply match up.
This stuff is like magic and I’m personally super glad that bliblubli is doing this and imo should keep doing this.
I think your identity and STRICTLY PERSONAL sense of ethos are keeping you from seeing the real dynamics in an unbiased way. Your intentions are superb but you emotionally find the funding methods for E-cycles unscrupulous because they don’t align with your own efforts and you are working backward from that feeling. You are projecting onto all customers that a major part of why we bought in is the promise that these developments will be included in master. I have no idea why you are comfortable making that assumption. Some of us just need to render faster, right now. There is absolutely no guarantee these changes will be included in master (unfortunately) and anyone who has followed the scene at all regarding scrambling distance/fracture modifier/any other interesting branch understands this. And no Mathieu is under NO obligation to go through the process of getting the code committed officially. That is a completely separate task from making a cool, valuable tool. But maybe someone else will push it through or improve on it - that happens all the time.
The bottom line is you can’t continue to assume the average person who would find this thread and pay for performance is ignorant. We know this is the open source world and things get a bit fractured and crazy. But they also get monumentally diverse and creative. And at this point you are not the bastion of righteousness you think you are. You are stifling the diversity of the scene. Live and let live and actually listen to the people responding to you. Its one of the hardest things in life to do but I know you can do it.
I uploaded an alternative build without dithered sobol but all the other improvements, because it somehow gave problem in normal sobol too. It’s only in extreme corner cases, so if you don’t encounter the problem, you can just keep the original february update. @rawalancheHere is a video rendered in full HD with motion blur of the scene 02 from Evermotion Does anyone know a free service to upload videos without reencoding?
Customers using Volumetrics seem to