Good idea, would be interesting to see what the Blender Benchmark files render like too I guess (Koro etc) Then we have hundreds of other times to compare against.
Still working on getting good results…in the meantime, I have a question. Is the star glare (for lack of a better description) part of this node group, or was it done some other way?
If it’s part of this group, how do you get it working?
@Optikz No, it’s not. I added the star glare effect with the Glare effect node of Blender.
I just finished a “new” version… I found a problem with the node and fixed it. The new version (1.1) will give better results with translucent/glass materials.
In about two more hours I’ll publish the updates + the San Miguel scene… It’s pretty much ready, I’m just finishing the documentation, I’ll add a few new things to it.
Ok, I uploaded the new 1.1 version of the node and documentation with a brief explanation of the changes (first post as always)… And yes, I also uploaded the San Miguel scene (and if you didn’t notice it, earlier I uploaded the Cornell Box scene)… With all these you should have a better idea of the parameters, as well as a couple scenes to play with and do some testing.
I hope all this helps clarify some doubts and you can achieve cool results with it!
Have a great weekend you all!
thank you for this, run a quick test with simple conell box setup, is Light Paths supposed to be set to Direct Light, and set diffuse to 0? with that it doesn’t seem to have a desirable result, see the image below, notice the ceiling is totally unlit
As far as I understand it, only the diffuse pass is set to 0 bounces all others are set at your will.
Download and compare with his Cornell Box.
Bounces:
Min/Max = 16
Diffuse = 0
Glossy = 4
Transmission = 16
Volume = 1
Tkz a lot !!!
I like it !!!
Hf and Happy blend!!!
Just FYI I donated some money on paypal. I read that it was your friends paypal. Just making sure that you know.
@bigdad, I haven’t received it yet. Hopefully your donation will arrive soon, :)…
The PayPal account is my brother’s, although soon I may have to use another one. I’ll inform you about this, of course. So far your donations have been very, very welcomed!
Thank you all for your kind donations, really!.. That keeps me motivated to post more things in the coming days! It’s been a long week, so I’ll get back to this tomorrow after resting a little bit… I’m not home, but later tonight I’ll give you proper feedback/tips about your scene, @SunBurn.
Greets!
tuqueque.
Hey, sorry for the long time to reply…
@wgan: The image you show, doesn’t seem to have any GI/SSGI working. It seems you didn’t set the SSGI properly. Did you check de Manual/Documentation included in my SSGI download?
@SunBurn: The screenshot doesn’t look perfect, but it looks ok. I think it can improve, but you might have to change a few things with the lighting/materials in the scene… For example, I think there’s too much direct light in there, maybe you are using Ambient Occlusion and I wouldn’t recommend that… Also, the floor and the cabinet seem to have too much reflections, you don’t seem to be using proper Fresnel relfections… Anyway, I’m just guessing all this looking at that screenshot. If you want, feel free to send me via PM the file to check it out and see how to improve the looks of the SSGI.
P.S.: I added a new (rather large) animated gif in the first post showing the San Miguel scene in a sort of “day-cycle” animation… BTW, the sun/sky in that animation is the procedural sky I talked about in my previous thread, 
@tuqueque
Thank you for your effort and your answers.
First of all I’ll make a couple things clear about the scene.
I’m using Filmic, No AO, My materials are PBR correctly (AFAIK, based on an older Cynicat Pros tutorial, and work just fine so far in all other scenes), no clamping involved.
I think there’s too much direct light in there
I’m using a grey card and False Colour to correctly expose my scene.(Something that already worked for me in so many other scenes).
Even if I disable completely my direct sun light and use only the skys indirect light (coming from and HDRI) I get the same weird results.
maybe you are using Ambient Occlusion
No, I never do unless I’m desperate to deliver in tight deadlines:).
Also, the floor and the cabinet seem to have too much reflections, you don’t seem to be using proper Fresnel reflections
Look above about the PBR workflow.
I’ll try to find some time and prepare a simplified version of my scene… but in the meantime maybe you could give us a couple of insights of your node setup.
What is going on behind the scenes, how this whole things works, maybe this could help us understand better how to use it.
Actually, it seems like you are doing all things right then and my node is just not “physically correct” enough… My node is totally artistic, it empirically follows physically correct concepts, but it doesn’t use real formulas or rules… In very simple words: “it just looks cool”.
Having said that… as I’ve shown in all the scenes and renders of the first post, it can look d@mn cool (in my not-so-humble opinion)… So, again, judging by your screenshot. I’d increase the Ambient Occlusion distance in Blender, let’s say you currently have it set at 1 meter, increase it to 2 or maybe even 4… If that doesn’t bring down a little bit the “overexposed” look of the render, I’d reduce the “GI Multiplier” parameter like 20-25% and maybe set the “Extra AO” to ~1.0 to add some shadowing and contact shadows.
Hopefully this gives you an idea or hint of what I would do.
tuqueque: you are awesome.
I have tried your composing node and it’s really good and works with animation (I have tried in lower resolution and didn’t notice any problems). But I had problems with fog/mist setting. I have tried to get rendering result similar to what I can get by using denoiser build by Lucas Stockner.
I want to make some simple animations for kids and I wanted to have fast rendering result (for example render time like 30 to 70 seconds per frame). Lucas denoiser gives me this possibility but I have to use additional animation denoising because there was flickering between frames or hmm how to call it in English - just flickering areas of pixels.
Lucas build is really fast and gives good quality (for me). Your composing nodes gives sharp result but it’s slow to get sharpen result. I have tried your blend files with my scene. I have changed your branched path tracing sample count value from 64 to 16 and it still gives a good result (added blur node to get the better result) but it’s still slow in comparison to rendering with Lucas denoiser (for example frame rendered by Lucas build 50 samples 65 seconds, with your composing nodes rendering 40 seconds plus composing 50 seconds). I am not an expert so maybe I am doing something wrong to get a faster render. Anyway, the result is really great.
I have noticed a problem. there was a problem in a scene when rendered animation has one frame totally black (for example 30 frames of animation were ok, but one in the middle was dark). But when I changed output resolution by any size in width or height then this black frame was rendered ok.
Thank you, Mobiledeveloper… Sorry for the late replay, BTW.
I have to admit that I haven’t done tests with fog/mist, but If I fins problems, I think I can make some changes to make the node work with those properly, today (Thursday) I’ll check on that.
About the time it takes the compositing node to finish, you could try the “Lite” version of the node, this should take a little bit less time to do the magic without noticeable quality loss and still usable for animations… Besides that, I think there’s not much you could do to improve rendertimes at the moment.
About the black frame you are getting, frankly, it seems like a bug. You might want to fill a proper bug report and post the scene so Blender developers can confirm it and hopefully solve it. There’s at least 5 bugs that I’ve reported over the years that Blender developers have fixed in a matter of hours.
FInally, probably starting Friday I’ll begin working on the documentation for the next tool I want to share: several material group shaders that… although I created specifically with my personal workflow in mind, for some of you might be very useful. A couple of those shaders have a cool trick that I’ve never have seen used before and help simulate simple glossy reflections in 30% less rendertime. Even if you don’t like my shaders, you might like that trick and use it on some of your materials.
Anyway, those should be ready next week! Hang tight!
@tuqueque
Sorry for the late answer but it has been an extremely busy week.
Unfortunately didn’t have any success.
The results look weird.
I was planning to use you set up for faster previews (for client approval) but it seems to brake my work-flow, since I have to manually tweak a lot of things to make it look good.
Maybe in the future I’ll give it a try starting a project from scratch with that in mind.
Thank you once again for you effort
That’s OK, @SunBurn… I’m sorry to read that the SSGI needs changes to your workflow. Hopefully for future projects you can set things up accordingly to it.
@Everybody: There’s a new version available!.. I fixed a rather stupid mistake I made in the SSGI node. There was a clamping issue that limited the effect in some corner cases. Hopefully it didn’t show up in your tests.
I updated everything accordingly. I also added another “tip” in the Documentation: You should be careful with the Clamping parameters of the Sampling section in the Render Settings. Low values can limit/cripple the SSGI calculation. Ideally, turning it off (0.0) would be desired to avoid surprises (unless you are 100% sure there’s no clamping limiting the effect or if the look you are obtaining is what you ultimately want).
Also, I’m considering on publishing the (modified) Class Room scene. Nothing really wonderful about it, just another scene to play with in case you’re interested. Just let me know.
No SSGI:
SSGI:
I tried and it works quite good for me, it’s a very interesting idea. It’s a shame the composition process is a little bit slow in my opinion, as someone said it takes about 50 seconds no matter what you do, that on top of the actual render but for some productions it could be a very interesting technique to try.
Great work mate!
Wow cool stuff ! I’m impressed this can be done with a post-process !