you are right of course, as always. what is really needed is a fine balance between quality and speed, at a pricepoint that is affordable yet high enough to sustain development, and available before my retirement.
From: Andy Moorer Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 9:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer 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, <[email protected]> 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.
