> I just finished a huge architectural project, rendered 8000 frames at > PAL resolution (on 4 computers), with pretty high AA settings. It's > just a matter of getting a little help in CPU power... as long as > render times stay below 10 minutes per frame it's manageable for production. > It's even possible to throw in some slow VSL shaders, or the > occasional area lightsource. Know how to optimize your scenes! Just > don't combine notorious CPU-hungry features like GI, volumetric > shadows, special lights. > The one thing I really fear is GI animation; the tutorial in the > manual (with temporal sampling) is really intimidating... I usually > bake an illumination map into the ceilings, this works very well.
For performance enhancements, I think there's a lot of tricks out there. eg. Volumetric smoke is a pig to raytrace, but there's been some work on realtime volumetric smoke for games and it looks fantastic. Whatever sort of a hack it is, it would be a useful addition. I'm thinking perhaps the engine could remain the default raytracer, but with various plugin render modes that are drawn and composited in as needed. eg. You could have some scenery perhaps with a characters, and select the scenery and set it's render mode to Scanline. This would then be rendered on a GPU perhaps, and the characters raytraced into the scene. For animation, it might be possible to have the software perform some smart or automated precalculations. For something like VSL noise, a texture map is far, far faster. So how's about per object or per material txture creation, where a texture is created at a specified resolution and that's used on the object? At the moment these sorts of optimisations need to be handled manually, rendering out textures with the associated problems that's had. Adding 10 minutes at the start of render to create textures and work from those would speed things up dramatically. Similarly for GI, precalculated Spherical Harmonics could work in a lot of cases to provide fast and useable GI after an initial calculation phase to set it all up. David Coombes [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Heuymans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2006 4:34 PM Subject: Re: Service Pack 3 > > >>And thanks for charging nothing again - RS still offers most bang > >>for your buck ;) > >> > >> > >>-Mark Heuymans > >> > >Normally a ServicePack or an update is only to solve bugs. > >It's really nice to them to add new features for free. > >Thankyou very much. > > > >Realsoft has alway been the most powerful software. > >The price is high, but for what you get... it's worth it. > > > >Jean-Sebastien Perron > >www.neuroworld.ws > > > > Absolutely, especially because with a single license you can set up > an unlimited render farm. No $$$ per CPU :) > > I mailed to this list a few times, but it seems that they don't > arrive if I mail from my new computer through a shared internet connection... > > About the raytracing discussion: yes, as always there are pros and > cons but I've always liked it and will to continue to like it! With > today's fast dual-core computers, raytracing is as useful as ever. If > I look back at my Amiga 32MHz days, I'm in heaven now. That doesn't > mean I wouldn't welcome some GPU help of course. > I just finished a huge architectural project, rendered 8000 frames at > PAL resolution (on 4 computers), with pretty high AA settings. It's > just a matter of getting a little help in CPU power... as long as > render times stay below 10 minutes per frame it's manageable for production. > It's even possible to throw in some slow VSL shaders, or the > occasional area lightsource. Know how to optimize your scenes! Just > don't combine notorious CPU-hungry features like GI, volumetric > shadows, special lights. > The one thing I really fear is GI animation; the tutorial in the > manual (with temporal sampling) is really intimidating... I usually > bake an illumination map into the ceilings, this works very well. > > > Happy rendering, > Mark H > > > >
