Well said, but speed is still important, deadlines are tight and particularly in the iterative direction phase often re-rendering takes much more time than making a directed change. "Dailies" reflect this... A series of several directed tweaks to a shot can stretch over several days in part to allow time to make changes and get them rendered... A major limitation to working with rendered VFX elements versus composite effects which can often be altered in near realtime.
Sent from my iPad On Mar 14, 2013, at 4:21 AM, <pete...@skynet.be> wrote: > > Please also bear in mind that we're still just in alpha and constantly > > improving performance. We're kind of obsessed with speed :) > > speed is great of course – but IMO it’s not the most important factor. > > over the years we have all been doing productions with rather long > rendertimes, running into hours per frame and more. The bottom line was > rarely “it has to be rendered in X amount of time” – clients couldn’t care > less. It has to be good enough first and rendered in time for delivery. > > it’s been a long time I’m looking forward for a viewport/GPU mental ray > replacement in softimage. > Hopefully staying below 5 minutes for complex HD images and within 1 minute > for more simple stuff – but more importantly, it should have the bells and > whistles of a modern raytracer, and deliver production quality rendering – > that can be very precisely tweaked by the user. > > It’s very frustrating to get a promising image very fast, but not being able > to make the image really final - some remaining artifacts, sampling problem > or no ability to finetune this or that effect or simply lack of a feature you > really require – so in turn you have to bite the bullet and go back to good > old offline rendering – and the corresponding rendertimes will be twice as > frustrating. > Very extensive support for lighting features – not just GI / AO / softshadows > / softreflections – but also SSS, raytraced refractions, motion blur, > volumetrics, ICE support, instancing, hair – and a good set of shaders and > support for the rendertree and as many of the factory shaders as possible. > > Mental ray never became the standard it was because of speed – but because of > what one can achieve with it. (and then you have to turn off a few things > left and right for final renders in order to make rendertimes acceptable) > Obviously in this day and age it’s features are getting long in the tooth as > well, which opens the door wide open for others – but it remains a reference > for what a renderer should at least aspire to. > > just some thoughts and hints of what matters to me when considering a new > renderer.
