Redshift Post-Effects

[chafouin]

I really like what Redshift has been adding to create bloom, flares and streak, it would be awesome to have similar effects available in Blender.
I know you can do a lot with the compositing inside blender, but we are still lacking a lot of controls on the flares shapes, and performance has been terrible for me, which makes it very hard to tweak values. It takes 7 seconds to render a single Glare node on a 1080p image, with a Titan X and OpenCL activated.

[Grimm]

Octane has those same effects in the Blender plugin. I know it’s not Cycles, but it’s another option.

[zanzio]

@Grimm

Octane has those same effects in the Blender plugin.

Redshift itself is coming to blender as well:

Redshift looking for rendering-related Blender addon programmers

Hello! Redshift Rendering Technologies (www.redshift3d.com) are looking for a good Blender addon programmer to help us integrate the Redshift GPU renderer to Blender! While our main office is in Southern California, we do work with a number of experienced developers around the world. So if you’re located outside the US and/or would like to work from home… no problem! Please note that this is a full-time, paid position and, depending on your prior experience, we’re willing to offer competitive …

I don’t know when it will be finished though.

[sus_unn]

You may use Fusion, Natron, or Nuke NC for such effects.

[chafouin]

I know I can use other softwares or render engines, I’m just suggesting what could be added to Cycles to improve it
I could also use Vray or corona to have bokeh shape textures and optical vignetting, but I like to use Cycles for many reasons and would love to keep doing so.

If the blender compositor performance were improved, it could be a lot more useful. I have a hard time believing than Tears of Steel compositing was only some in blender when I see how bad it performs on my Titan X.

[zanzio]

@chafouin

I have a hard time believing than Tears of Steel compositing was only some in blender when I see how bad it performs on my Titan X

There are possibly some optimizations you can do to get better performance (set edit performance to low?). I mean, the foundation didn’t lie when they said they did all their compositing for tears of steel in blender.

I’m not an expert in this area, but I heard the main reason compositing is slow is because the nodes don’t cache data. Every tweak you make to your setup requires blender to rerun the data through the node chain, while dedicated compositors use cached data up to the node that is changed. We are also supposed to get a big speedup when they make the compositor sample based (whatever that means).

[chafouin]

It’s good to hear that there are plans to improve performance.
I know there is no caching, but it’s that case it’s it’s even caching that is the problem, it’s only one node that is super slow to render (and it’s the same speed with most of the nodes).

Using low quality and small chunk size already, didn’t make much of a difference, but thanks for the suggestion !

[CarlG]

Tried the CgVirus one?

[zeauro]

@chafouin

I know you can do a lot with the compositing inside blender, but we are still lacking a lot of controls on the flares shapes

With removal of Blender Internal, there is no more halo material in blender 2.8.
Creating a vertex with an halo material and rendering it, is a way to create lens flares in 2.79.

[chafouin]

Still not comparable procedurally generated lens effects, but decent alternatives. I think there is a reason why professionals using Corona, Octane or Redshift appreciate these post effects tools. It’s not a matter of money or time, they could use Nuke or whatever sprite FXs, it’s just nice to have a realistic lens look right there in your render
Which is also why I dig having Compositing inside Blender, I haven’t use much of Fusion for quite a while, simply because I can get a lot of things done automatically, at the end of each of my renders, right there in the same software