I assume you mean just free, not “free source” as in open source, as I am 99% sure you’d not utilize the open source aspect of it.
I’d suggest just Unreal Engine 5, if what you are after is ability to render highly complex scenes fast.
Clarisse’s renderer is an Arnold type of renderer. It will be fast in exterior scenario with little to no occlusion from environmental direct lighting, but degrades down to unusably slow in interior scenarios or general scenarios where most of the scene is lit by indirect light.
Clarisse’s workflow and stability also leave a lot to be desired, which is why you see so few people (individual artists) using it despite the flashy claims they make about their software.
interactive viewports are insanely fast, final renders take -ofcourse- some time.
But it’s not that, what counts is the insane amounts of data it can handle for rendering.
It seriously is in it’s own league. Only Katana can be compared to it I guess.
Blender has serious problems with large datasets, and I don’t see this changing in the near future without some core rewrites.
So, is it slower than Blender GPU rendering? When comparing a scene that works in Blender of course.
Just interested because I could use some more scalability regarding poly and object count but I have my render times low enough in Blender at the moment that I don’t even have to utilize a render farm. And that is a useful aspect as well.
There’s no real comparison to the scenes that are normally rendered in Clarisse and Blender.
I would suggest downloading and testing a trial to see what’s going on. From what I’ve seen at vfx companies, it is really capable of dealing with insane amounts of objects.
Hmm… why not? I am sure Clarisse can render something that is just as large so that Blender starts choking. Say, 50K Objects, a total of 10 Million Polygons or something like that. All objects shaded with semi complex procedural shaders.
In terms of being able to throw a modest amount of objects at blender, it’s already doing an okey"ish" job even on my old hardware, interactivity on the other hand is not quite there yet, moving around in cycles is a no no (takes forever to update but, at least it doesn’t crash XD)
Switching to solid view and only displaying the bounding box of the dragons does help regain some interactivity.
If this new “heavy scene optimized” viewport is the real deal, then we should be getting close to at least houdini/solaris level of scene assembly (through USD and such).
PS: if someone with better hardware (RTX 3080->3090 with some beefy CPU to complement them) is willing to test the same scene, i will upload it, just to see how performance is on newer hardware.
That’s not how it works. Production scenes are not a single mesh instanced large amount of times with a simple material under simple lighting conditions. It’s usually dozens or hundreds unique high poly meshes with high complexity material in complex lighting scenarios, often also combined with volumes.
All that your test shows is that Cycles is capable of instancing. Literally any modern renderer is.
I think blender is already capable of large “enough” landscapes, it’s just that ppl stopped trying, assuming it can’t do anything (I might be wrong), having this new optimized viewport would only open up the possibilities for even larger scenes inside of blender.
I never said Blender isn’t capable of making complex scenes (It is, but you will spend most of the time on optimizations and workarounds rather than focusing on the art itself, the way you can in Clarisse or UE5).
All I said was that tests showcasing many instances of a single mesh in a trivial lighting and shading scenario and then counting the resulting triangles by taking a polycount of that single mesh and multiplying it by the number of generated instances is by no means useful to determine if sofware is capable of handling complex CG production scenes. By those measures, any experimental path tracer a CGI science student writes in a couple of weeks as a school assignment would be.
Yes obviously since it runs on CPU. A fair comparison would be Cycles running on CPU only. I’d say even then Cycles probably is a little faster (with smaller scenes), but the difference should be trivial.
Obviously that goes out the window if you stuff the scene with tons of meshes.
I did some rendertests a while ago with some of my models and the average rendertime was on par with what Arnold and Cycles would give me. Around 15 minutes for an 1080p render with no obvious noise on my old I7 4 core. Works for stills, but if you want to do an animation…
If you want it to use it for commercial production I would absolutely calculate a renderfarm into your price.
I can confirm Blender can’t handle very large highly detailed scenes. Try using 8k, 16k or 32k textures or even 64k textures for a lot of assets that are very high poly in a project. the viewport is going to take a long time to load all these textures and manage the polycount. Thats why 3dsmax/Maya have a very smart viewport management system.
I do believe though that way back in the early days of Blender being open source, there actually was a sizable chunk of code that was done in Python, but much of it was quickly replaced with C. Later on the UI code would change to being powered by an overhauled Python API backed by GPU shading code.
Though now what is happening is that C itself is being displaced by C++, possibly because the language itself has seen a lot of improvements in the last 10 years.
And speaking as a professional Python programmer, Python is never appropriate for high performance software. Further, whenever you see something that seems high performance in Python, it’s because there’s some C code being used.
We’ve just made the switch to Clarisse. Our shots are just way too heavy for Blender to handle. I was playing with 58 billion poly scenes and Clarisse pop up a message saying: Is that the best you can do? Come on! Bring it on! (I’m kidding of course) but yeah, Clarisse is insane. No more bounding boxes and proxies. We go full res all the time. And now it’s both GPU and CPU.
can you try www.gafferhq.org on the youtube channel,
if you have searched then you will finds it also runs on windows, hehe
sir if time permits I request you to look into it in a youtube video
Clarisse is amazing!
One of the most surprising things is that you never have to adjust clipping distances for cameras anymore. Tiny ant in the foreground with real life small planet in the background? No problem for clarisse. … never seen this before.
