Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
I´m using xsi2012sap here and find it brutally anoying to see the Irradiance Particle calculation´s IP Optimize use a single CPU thread only, especially for settings with Importons Density dialed above 1. At least I can´t tell a quality increase between a setting of 1 to 2, just the way you´d want things to turn out... Irradiance Particles are really nice otherwise, seem to even be energy conserving actually. If you compare Iparticles to how the Fallof Start Stop option "works" for good old FinalGathering, that is neither desireable nor nice to make use of it... Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? All that is boring me to the brink of buying a personal V-Ray 2.0 license and even thinking about how much hassle Maya would be anyway... Cheers, tim P.S: I would have thought nVidia Corp. is clever enough to realize they have the fastest GPUs to make mR rendering at least seem nice...
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
On 27/03/2013 6:56 PM, Tim Leydecker wrote: Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? Nope. The word "satellite" was never mentioned by anybody.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Wait, I´ll just checked my spelling. f***. satellite. no typo. I´m bored of this mental crap. But thanks for the info, Stephen. It´s welcome as always, helps making a decision. Cheers, tim On 28.03.2013 00:18, Stephen Blair wrote: On 27/03/2013 6:56 PM, Tim Leydecker wrote: Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? Nope. The word "satellite" was never mentioned by anybody.
RE: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Be very careful with the importons density, because the slider range in SI is totally off scale. Value of one means one importon ray per pixel, thats a *very* high quality setting. I use values down to 0.05 for (ultra)fast previews and ramp it up to 1 for high quality (overnight) renders... so value of 2 or above is like rendering with AA of min5max5 as a comparison.:) Better factory scale for the slider would have been 0.01 to 2 I think. sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 23:56 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded? I´m using xsi2012sap here and find it brutally anoying to see the Irradiance Particle calculation´s IP Optimize use a single CPU thread only, especially for settings with Importons Density dialed above 1. At least I can´t tell a quality increase between a setting of 1 to 2, just the way you´d want things to turn out... Irradiance Particles are really nice otherwise, seem to even be energy conserving actually. If you compare Iparticles to how the Fallof Start Stop option "works" for good old FinalGathering, that is neither desireable nor nice to make use of it... Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? All that is boring me to the brink of buying a personal V-Ray 2.0 license and even thinking about how much hassle Maya would be anyway... Cheers, tim P.S: I would have thought nVidia Corp. is clever enough to realize they have the fastest GPUs to make mR rendering at least seem nice...
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
I wouldn't recommend changing from Softimage to Maya. I've been there and back. But if you dare to give it a try, start browsing the web for Maya scripts. You will need a lot of them to have something that will perhaps perform like Softimage. Not to mention to take a deep breath before diving into the hypershade node, maya nodes and where is the connection that you are looking. 2013/3/27 Tim Leydecker > Wait, I惻l just checked my spelling. > f***. satellite. no typo. > > I惴 bored of this mental crap. > > But thanks for the info, Stephen. > > It愀 welcome as always, helps making a decision. > > Cheers, > > tim > > > > > > > > On 28.03.2013 00:18, Stephen Blair wrote: > >> On 27/03/2013 6:56 PM, Tim Leydecker wrote: >> >>> Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? >>> >> Nope. The word "satellite" was never mentioned by anybody. >> >> --
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Sven, thanks for the info. I am range testing lowering Irradiance rays against density. I had hoped that I could use a higher density to keep the rays closer to 128-256. (I´m pushing the classroom scene, loads of nasty noise) Irradiance Particles feel very slow, mostly because of the lack of visual feedback, that sucks when tweaking but once that damn preprocessing is done. Am now at 256-350 rays and density 2 My frametimes are all around 01:30:00 - 02:45:00, yes 1 1/2 hours and up at HD720 w/DOF. Clean, presentable frames, using unified sampling (which is really nice) The Automatic FinalGather alternative is similarly fast/slow with 1536-2048 rays. All that is mR 3.9.x, so I lack a few optimizations and yes, it hurts. Cheers, tim On 28.03.2013 00:53, Sven Constable wrote: Be very careful with the importons density, because the slider range in SI is totally off scale. Value of one means one importon ray per pixel, that’s a *very* high quality setting. I use values down to 0.05 for (ultra)fast previews and ramp it up to 1 for high quality (overnight) renders... so value of 2 or above is like rendering with AA of min5max5 as a comparison.:) Better factory scale for the slider would have been 0.01 to 2 I think. sven -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 23:56 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded? I´m using xsi2012sap here and find it brutally anoying to see the Irradiance Particle calculation´s IP Optimize use a single CPU thread only, especially for settings with Importons Density dialed above 1. At least I can´t tell a quality increase between a setting of 1 to 2, just the way you´d want things to turn out... Irradiance Particles are really nice otherwise, seem to even be energy conserving actually. If you compare Iparticles to how the Fallof Start Stop option "works" for good old FinalGathering, that is neither desireable nor nice to make use of it... Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? All that is boring me to the brink of buying a personal V-Ray 2.0 license and even thinking about how much hassle Maya would be anyway... Cheers, tim P.S: I would have thought nVidia Corp. is clever enough to realize they have the fastest GPUs to make mR rendering at least seem nice...
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Emilio, thanks for the warning. I came from Maya, cost me a couple of years of my life learning it. You are right about Maya´s finesse in helping the artist to his daily frustration. I didn´t mean to say I´ll kick Softimage but I need Maya to test a few render options. Still owning it, I should use it before I completely forget about the Spacebar... Cheers, tim On 28.03.2013 00:58, Emilio Hernandez wrote: I wouldn't recommend changing from Softimage to Maya. I've been there and back. But if you dare to give it a try, start browsing the web for Maya scripts. You will need a lot of them to have something that will perhaps perform like Softimage. Not to mention to take a deep breath before diving into the hypershade node, maya nodes and where is the connection that you are looking. 2013/3/27 Tim Leydecker Wait, I惻l just checked my spelling. f***. satellite. no typo. I惴 bored of this mental crap. But thanks for the info, Stephen. It愀 welcome as always, helps making a decision. Cheers, tim On 28.03.2013 00:18, Stephen Blair wrote: On 27/03/2013 6:56 PM, Tim Leydecker wrote: Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? Nope. The word "satellite" was never mentioned by anybody. --
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
A new render engine is coming for Softimage. Redshift 3d. I am in the alpha test group and all I can say it is an amazing render engine. It is GPU based and it is amazing fast. It's integration with Softimage is seamless. Easy to setup and you will be rendering without flicker in no time. The results are amazing. This one is going to ksa. 2013/3/27 Tim Leydecker > Hey Sven, > > thanks for the info. > > I am range testing lowering Irradiance rays against density. > > I had hoped that I could use a higher density to keep the rays closer to > 128-256. > > (I´m pushing the classroom scene, loads of nasty noise) > > Irradiance Particles feel very slow, mostly because of the lack of visual > feedback, > that sucks when tweaking but once that damn preprocessing is done. > > Am now at 256-350 rays and density 2 > > My frametimes are all around 01:30:00 - 02:45:00, yes 1 1/2 hours and up at > HD720 w/DOF. > > Clean, presentable frames, using unified sampling (which is really nice) > > The Automatic FinalGather alternative is similarly fast/slow with > 1536-2048 rays. > > All that is mR 3.9.x, so I lack a few optimizations and yes, it hurts. > > Cheers, > > > tim > > > > > On 28.03.2013 00:53, Sven Constable wrote: > >> Be very careful with the importons density, because the slider range in SI >> is totally off scale. Value of one means one importon ray per pixel, >> that’s >> a *very* high quality setting. >> I use values down to 0.05 for (ultra)fast previews and ramp it up to 1 for >> high quality (overnight) renders... so value of 2 or above is like >> rendering >> with AA of min5max5 as a comparison.:) >> Better factory scale for the slider would have been 0.01 to 2 I think. >> >> sven >> >> -Original Message- >> From: >> softimage-bounces@listproc.**autodesk.com >> [mailto:softimage-bounces@**listproc.autodesk.com] >> On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker >> Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 23:56 >> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.**com >> Subject: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still >> single >> threaded? >> >> I´m using xsi2012sap here and find it brutally anoying to see the >> Irradiance >> Particle calculation´s IP Optimize use a single CPU thread only, >> especially >> for settings with Importons Density dialed above 1. >> >> At least I can´t tell a quality increase between a setting of >> 1 to 2, just the way you´d want things to turn out... >> >> Irradiance Particles are really nice otherwise, seem to even be energy >> conserving actually. >> >> If you compare Iparticles to how the Fallof Start Stop option "works" for >> good old FinalGathering, that is neither desireable nor nice to make use >> of >> it... >> >> Any info on reworked mR satellite support with Softimage 2014? >> >> All that is boring me to the brink of buying a personal V-Ray 2.0 license >> and even thinking about how much hassle Maya would be anyway... >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> >> tim >> >> >> P.S: I would have thought nVidia Corp. is clever enough to realize they >> have >> the fastest GPUs to make mR rendering at least seem nice... >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> --
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez wrote: Redshift 3d
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav On Mar 29, 2013 6:20 AM, "Christopher" wrote: > How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition > :) > > Christopher > > Emilio Hernandez wrote: > >> Redshift 3d >> >
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. On Mar 29, 2013 9:20 AM, "Octavian Ureche" wrote: > You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well > integrated and production proven. > > Cheers, > Octav > On Mar 29, 2013 6:20 AM, "Christopher" > wrote: > >> How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good >> condition :) >> >> Christopher >> >> Emilio Hernandez wrote: >> >>> Redshift 3d >>> >>
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
On 3/29/2013 10:23 AM, Octavian Ureche wrote: Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI)
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render displacement mapping, fast ? Christopher Kamen Lilov Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI) Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 4:20 AM You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well integrated and production proven. Cheers, Octav Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 1:19 AM How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition :) Christopher Emilio Hernandez Friday, March 29, 2013 12:38 AM A new render engine is coming for Softimage. Redshift 3d. I am in the alpha test group and all I can say it is an amazing render engine. It is GPU based and it is amazing fast. It's integration with Softimage is seamless. Easy to setup and you will be rendering without flicker in no time. The results are amazing. This one is going to ksa.--
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition on the freelance/small studio front. For that matter Redshift looks extremely promising as well. But for the past couple of years, vray gave me the piece of mind i never had with mentalray, and i'm thankful to the peeps at chaos group for that. Cheers On Mar 29, 2013 4:04 PM, "Christopher" wrote: > Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render > displacement mapping, fast ? > > Christopher > > Kamen Lilov > Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM > > To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also > comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you > render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. > (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute > force GI) > > > Octavian Ureche > Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM > > Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 > render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for > redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark. > Octavian Ureche > Friday, March 29, 2013 4:20 AM > > You do know vray is also available for softimage and it's pretty well > integrated and production proven. > > Cheers, > Octav > Christopher > Friday, March 29, 2013 1:19 AM > How much is it going to cost ? My arm and leg, which are in good condition > :) > > Christopher > > > Emilio Hernandez > Friday, March 29, 2013 12:38 AM > A new render engine is coming for Softimage. Redshift 3d. I am in the > alpha test group and all I can say it is an amazing render engine. It is > GPU based and it is amazing fast. It's integration with Softimage is > seamless. Easy to setup and you will be rendering without flicker in no > time. > > The results are amazing. This one is going to ksa. > > > > > > -- > > <><><>
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
you state that like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Octavian Ureche wrote: > Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or > arnold. >
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
What about Maxwell, which render has lots it's potential ? Christopher Sent from my Desktop ;-) Steven Caron Friday, March 29, 2013 2:19 PM you state that like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know. Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 2:06 PM Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition on the freelance/small studio front. For that matter Redshift looks extremely promising as well. But for the past couple of years, vray gave me the piece of mind i never had with mentalray, and i'm thankful to the peeps at chaos group for that. Cheers Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 11:03 AM Vray seems to be getting so much attention, how does it render displacement mapping, fast ? Christopher Kamen Lilov Friday, March 29, 2013 10:59 AM To be precise, this is the price of one interactive license, which also comes with 5 render nodes (you get 10 nodes with VRay for Maya). If you render static scenes with DR, you can use all 6 licenses at the same time. (we do not recommend rendering animated sequences with DR, except for brute force GI) Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 4:23 AM Price wise, last i checked, vray was just about under 1k and came with 10 render nodes. But i'm also looking forward to an official price for redshift. Might be quite tempting if it's in the right ballpark.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Steven, No i have not directly. But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). Vray is definitely not that fast.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
i wouldn't say arnold is as fast at displacement as a reyes renderer ought to be. also their is the quality to compare too. i really like arnold, but i hate to see it being built up to be magical without actual fact to back it up. i would hazard a guess that vray and arnold displacement are closer than you might think. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Octavian Ureche wrote: > Hey Steven, > > No i have not directly. > But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, > i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms > of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes > renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have > seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). > Vray is definitely not that fast. >
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Sort of as an aside, we were talking license counts the other day and discovered the "-processing" license flag. If you didn't know about this, it seems to allow you to not only process scenes with an arbitrary number of Softimage instances, but also lets you render using 3rd party renderers without pulling the limited xsibatch tokens. From what I can tell, you essentially have unlimited command line Softimages, but a fixed number of mental rays. Good news for people looking at 3rd party renderers, as you don't have to factor in the cost of bundled mental ray as you expand your farm, and you don't have to worry about implementing an .ass file pipeline (unless you want to for other reasons). I'm not sure it's actually changed anything in terms of what we would have bought, as we've got a fair number of xsibatch already, but it's just nice to know, and it's making it much easier to roll out a hybrid workflow.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Christopher, I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its beta as well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. I cannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i have not touched it since. Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first and foremost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat its solution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs to do a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant for me, as an individual, was that animation was out of the question unless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to wait a long time for the frames to be rendered. Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in an animation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind). This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnold from this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turn takes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do not precompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereas vray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choices to "cheat" its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which in turn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user. On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershader approach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not use light sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using a special shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked very realistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that time in terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, so you could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things before waiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire" engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview or vray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature of the engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file), which stored lighting information from all the light sources. That meant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fix everything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. You could dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, and everything would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear now they have a nuke plugin for this. Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver. I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, and it had around 50 lights total. The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights on and off. Had it not been for this feature, i would have been rendering a week on the project. With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozen variations in half an hour from the same render. Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration was not that good nor stable back then. Maybe now things have changed, but last i looked, it was pretty much the same workflow. Cheers, O
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Hey Steven, You are right. Arnold is pretty much looked upon as the magical solution to everyone's rendering problems (i know because i certainly think it too when sh hits the fan with what i use), which tends to become annoying. But i'd love to see a displacement test of both. Unfortunately there's no trial version of arnold yet. What i'm thinking is maybe i could find someone on this list that has a similar proc as mine (i7 3770k 3.5 ghz), and we could share a similar scene with the same model and displacement map, just to get an idea of rendertimes and memory footprint at the same res. If anyone is up for it, send me a mail. I have a couple of days to kill until the next gig.
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
just do it! start a new thread. provide the vray side with whatever scene and/or parameters and i am sure someone with an arnold license will step up. i wont promise i can but if i find the time i might contribute an arnold test. On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Octavian Ureche wrote: > > If anyone is up for it, send me a mail. I have a couple of days to > kill until the next gig. >
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Thank you that was very informative :) What render do you recommend to have besides Mental Ray ? Christopher Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 3:35 PM Hey Christopher,I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its betaas well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. Icannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i havenot touched it since.Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first andforemost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat itssolution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs todo a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant forme, as an individual, was that animation was out of the questionunless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to waita long time for the frames to be rendered.Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in ananimation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind).This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnoldfrom this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turntakes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do notprecompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereasvray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choicesto "cheat" its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which inturn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user.On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershaderapproach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not uselight sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using aspecial shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked veryrealistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that timein terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, soyou could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things beforewaiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire"engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview orvray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature ofthe engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file),which stored lighting information from all the light sources. Thatmeant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fixeverything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. Youcould dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, andeverything would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear nowthey have a nuke plugin for this.Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver.I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, andit had around 50 lights total.The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights onand off. Had it not been for this feature,i would have been rendering a week on the project.With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozenvariations in half an hour from the same render.Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration wasnot that good nor stable back then.Maybe now things have changed, but last i looked, it was pretty muchthe same workflow.Cheers,O Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 3:12 PM Hey Steven,No i have not directly. But having looked at arnold videos on the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again, this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really cheat rendering speed). Vray is definitely not that fast. Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 2:44 PM What about Maxwell, which render has lots it's potential ? Christopher Sent from my Desktop ;-) Steven Caron Friday, March 29, 2013 2:19 PM you state that like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know. Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 2:06 PM Displacement is fast, but obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and its ibl tools are stellar. Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competitio
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Well, i thought i made it pretty obvious given the vray preaching i just did. If not here it is: vray. Also, if you're not into animation, and more on the still render side, you should definitely check out keyshot. Modo has a very good renderer as well, but unfortunately i still haven't managed to get used to its interface and shading system. I find them clunky, but that's just personal bias. 3delight is also an interesting choice if you're doing animation with tons of displacement, hair, dof and motionblur, though i don't know what has been happening lately on its development front. It used to have a free license for personal use, but i can't recall if the offer was for xsi or maya. But with the xsi platform in mind, i think redshift looks really promising. Cpu's are expensive like hell. This could free up a freelancer's budget if priced accordingly, and integrated correctly. PS. I'll share that vray vs arnold displacement test scene this weekend. See if we can get any real data. Night,
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Sorry I didn't catch your answer even though you were screaming it, your reply could have been a documentary on renders I got lost in it :-) I've been testing 3Delight, from their demo, I like how it renders, but is there any hipcup when it converts Mental Ray shaders to Renderman, I was told converting can sometimes be a bad thing. Too bad there isn't some renderman nodes in Softimage :) This is a tough choice, redshift makes unbelievable rendered images, with the right knowledge you can turn out nice from Mental Ray just as well. I look forward to the test scenes. If keyshot is good at stills, and 3Delight is good at animation, does that make Vray a blend of the two ? Christopher Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 7:14 PM Well, i thought i made it pretty obvious given the vray preaching i just did. If not here it is: vray.Also, if you're not into animation, and more on the still render side, you should definitely check out keyshot. Modo has a very good renderer as well, but unfortunately i still haven't managed to get used to its interface and shading system. I find them clunky, but that's just personal bias. 3delight is also an interesting choice if you're doing animation with tons of displacement, hair, dof and motionblur, though i don't know what has been happening lately on its development front. It used to have a free license for personal use, but i can't recall if the offer was for xsi or maya. But with the xsi platform in mind, i think redshift looks really promising. Cpu's are expensive like hell. This could free up a freelancer's budget if priced accordingly, and integrated correctly. PS. I'll share that vray vs arnold displacement test scene this weekend. See if we can get any real data.Night, Christopher Friday, March 29, 2013 6:41 PM Thank you that was very informative :) What render do you recommend to have besides Mental Ray ? Christopher Octavian Ureche Friday, March 29, 2013 3:35 PM Hey Christopher,I think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its betaas well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. Icannot say anything about the current state of the engine as i havenot touched it since.Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt slow, first andforemost because it is an unbiased engine, and it does not cheat itssolution. That means in order to get rid of the sampling it needs todo a ton of passes to get an accurate convergence. What that meant forme, as an individual, was that animation was out of the questionunless i was willing to work with a grainy image or if i chose to waita long time for the frames to be rendered.Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell in ananimation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind).This was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnoldfrom this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turntakes a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do notprecompute or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereasvray, even if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choicesto "cheat" its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which inturn, unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user.On the upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershaderapproach, tons of shaders available in the community. Did not uselight sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using aspecial shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked veryrealistic. Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that timein terms of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, soyou could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things beforewaiting for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire"engine. But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview orvray's light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature ofthe engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file),which stored lighting information from all the light sources. Thatmeant if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fixeverything afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. Youcould dial the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, andeverything would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear nowthey have a nuke plugin for this.Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was a lifesaver.I remember this one time i had an interior to render for a client, andit had around 50 lights total.The guy did a dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights onand off. Had it not been for this feature,i would have been rendering a week on the project.With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a dozenvariations in half an hour from the same render.Final thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration wasnot that goo
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
"lets you render using 3rd party renderers without pulling the limited xsibatch tokens" Sorry, guys, but this is too huge a discovery to let sink in this thread! GREAT find Andy! It would never occur to me that -processing could be exploited for render purposes. I imagine this loophole will be closed up double-quick though, now that it's been flagged! DAN On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Andy Jones wrote: > Sort of as an aside, we were talking license counts the other day and > discovered the "-processing" license flag. If you didn't know about this, > it seems to allow you to not only process scenes with an arbitrary number > of Softimage instances, but also lets you render using 3rd party renderers > without pulling the limited xsibatch tokens. From what I can tell, you > essentially have unlimited command line Softimages, but a fixed number of > mental rays. Good news for people looking at 3rd party renderers, as you > don't have to factor in the cost of bundled mental ray as you expand your > farm, and you don't have to worry about implementing an .ass file pipeline > (unless you want to for other reasons). I'm not sure it's actually changed > anything in terms of what we would have bought, as we've got a fair number > of xsibatch already, but it's just nice to know, and it's making it much > easier to roll out a hybrid workflow. > >
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
i doubt it, processing flag is there for that exact reason. we have been using for a long time, 2007 maybe. they obviously only care about one renderer. requiring another softimage license would be cost prohibative. they could do a lot of damage if they change this! s *written with my thumbs On Mar 30, 2013, at 1:57 AM, Dan Yargici wrote: I imagine this loophole will be closed up double-quick though, now that it's been flagged!
Re: Softimage 2013/2014 Irradiance Particles - IP Optimize still single threaded?
Yeah, I agree. I'm assuming the xsibatch license tokens are tied in with Mental Ray licensing. Given that -processing already allows you to do everything but render, it would be very strange to prevent you from kicking off the execution of a 3rd party plugin. On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 10:30 AM, Steven Caron wrote: > i doubt it, processing flag is there for that exact reason. we have been > using for a long time, 2007 maybe. they obviously only care about one > renderer. requiring another softimage license would be cost prohibative. > they could do a lot of damage if they change this! >
