Sorry…not playing this game with you…because no matter what I show you, you’ll still argue that you can’t tell the difference.
There is no need to a 1:1 comparison here. Just look at the damn video I posted and compare with some of the best environmental renders from Cycles and that’s really all that needs to be said.
The problem I am seeing in this long lasting discussion is that all has been based on words or not variable-controlled images, there is no concrete points other than vague ideas being thrown.
Is there a Cycles version of the same scene and lightings and input RGB colorspace and view transform? If not, it’s not helping us narrowing down the answer of "What is making Octane look better’
Well I guess both of you are right. We need a scientific basis but I also think if you’re a professional you can analyse videos and photos and extract the differences. In this example between octane and blender. But that’s why I am asking since the start of this chat, if we know any experts in this field and can ask them, since they know about the scientific background and code differences of the software.
This is incredibly frustrating because you’re choosing to be argumentative for reasons that I don’t understand. Have you ever worked in CG film production (not animation) as an actual final pixel artist? If you have, then you’d know immediately what I’m talking about.
What I will say is that even Blender’s own Cycles developers have publicly acknowledged that Cycles’ shaders were never designed for realism.
If you really want to crack this nut, why don’t you take it upon yourself to play with Octane and do the type of comparisons that will give you the scientific method that you seek?
Again, it’s about narrowing down the answer so we can improve it. Instead of saying “A is better than B but nobody knows why”, let’s “make series of comparisons and try to discuss what the reason might be”
Here is something (but you’re still totally missing the point IMHO):
https://www.artstation.com/blogs/reneaigner/NoBB/comparing-octane-and-cycles-for-interior-renderings
Comparisons are what we really need here. I came across this article on the subject, and one paragraph stood out to me.
“…and while they do look very similar in their final form, this time around the Cycles rendering needed a lot of help to get to this level, whereas the Octane rendering is, apart from the grade obviously, out of the box.”
I imagine this is probably the biggest difference between Cycles and Octane. It’s not that the former can’t perform at the level of the latter, but that it can take more effort to get to the same level of output.
So you probably could render a scene in Blender that’d match the look and quality of Midphase’s video above, but you’ll have to spend some time messing around with various settings, and probably know how to work around a few Cycles specific quirks to get there.
edit: If only I hit the reply button 3 seconds earlier.
HA! Great minds (or googlers!).
I still don’t think there is a way in hell to make Cycles look like that one World Creator video I posted above…no matter how much post-massaging is done to the images.
But yeah…here’s what the guy from this article states (not sure if he’s right or wrong but nonetheless it’s a decent try at comparing the two):
The differences primarily come down to:
What I would be looking for is not so much as same look or quality, but rather, differences under the same condition.
For instance
Is it light fall of? Is the difference about light transport? Does black and white light have the same behavior or is it just chromatic lights? How much is the view tranform playing a role here? Does the RGB input space matter?
Is it a fresnel thing? What kind of fresnel setting is available in Octane? How can we make it comparable to Cycles’ setting?
Something like that. Instad of “look at this video and see how good looking Octane can be”
Here’s another side by side that I found…although not great. But even forgetting the glass which obviously is the most striking difference, look at the table top which is also a rather stark difference:
Just for completeness’ sake, here’s the image from the article above showing Octane vs Cycles with exactly the same scene and color management. It would be hard to deny that Octane looks better here:
You can really see Octane excelling on small highlights on bevels, and in depth of color- the Octane reds look much better.
Also look at the seat cushions- the Cycles ones are much more uniform in color, and they look like plastic as a result. The Octane ones have a lot more complexity and look more realistic.
BTW: Octane is on top
Once again…test it out for yourself since you can then apply whatever criteria you need to in order to evaluate the differences on a sub-pixel level.
Blender is free, and so is Octane for Blender!
You can download it right here:
Only if all of your shaders have the Principled Nodes at their core (with the one put into the tree at the start not even being energy conserving in cases). Those nodes work great for the Institute’s Open Movie toons, but they are not recommended for everyone.
There was one point about glossiness for instance, group nodes made using the building blocks will avoid issues like the apparent ‘floor’ in glossiness and diffuse roughness feeling like a hack due to not making use of Oren-Nayer shading.
I will also note on the glass example, the lightpath node can be used to both get the correct refractive effect and to not color the reflections. Unfortunately, a lot of people will ignore the somewhat lower-level tricks and instead expect the BF to provide pre-built solutions (even though you can find alternative uber shaders on the Blender Market and other sites).
Your point is moot. If 99.999% of Blender users rely on the Principled Shader as their main go-to shader – then it needs to be fixed to look as good as what can be achieved by building your own shader from scratch.
Ok, on this comparison what I am seeing:
Top has the left orange light more nicely attenuated, while the buttom is skewing to yellow. If they are the same view transform, the reason for this is an interesting thing to investigate.
Top has the top of the tree on the right side lit up, while buttom is not. Something about SSS or translucent shading?
Top image also seem to have the tree’s top light a bit colder? What is the input RGB value and space? I wonder whether this is because of the difference of working white point the Spectral renderer is using.
EDIT:
Just noticed, top seem to have additional orange lights on the right edge, what’s with that?
Now let me also say this about Octane – OTOY as a company is frustrating AF. As I said above, the Octane for Blender implementation is ass backwards for sure. They’re been talking about turning it into an add-on but either this is incredibly low priority for them, or they just don’t know exactly how to do it. Their documentation is outdated for pretty much every single platform they support. They seem to be more focused on working on whatever excites them at the moment than to actually fix their damn code and make Octane production ready. Their support is kinda non-existent. And lastly…for me as a MacOS user, their support of the platform is not good at all, including that they no longer seem to support Octane for Blender for Metal on Intel machines (you know…like the Mac Pros which is exactly the type of Mac one would want to use for CG)!!!
To me, the biggest differences between the two scenes are from the lighting attributed from the light panels on the ceiling, which is likely an emission shader.
From my experiences, you have to really overblow your emission strength to get the light to travel through the scene, which leaves you with superbright objects casting a relatively low amount of light. For the sake of avoiding that, it seems that guy kept the emission strength down to roughly the same levels as what he used in Octane, and lost some of the ambient light along that top edge above the pipe as a consequence.
have a look at the stove area. the tiles are completely washed out in cycles. the metal of the pot also looks different. there is generally much less definition in cycles.
I think the pot looks better in the Cycles shot. It’s more metallic.
Better emission highlights are also something that results from swapping out Filmic for AgX (in that the highlights will not blow out near as fast when the strength is turned up). I know Octane has AgX now as well, but before then it always had cinematic tonemapping options.
This is a valid point, but you are talking about Blender. It sometimes takes a lot of noise for the BF to start grasping the importance of things like good defaults (see the mega-threads on performance for edit mode and OpenSubDiv). At the least we do have someone rewriting the Principled Shader (with a lot of prep work already done and inside Blender).
