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
Wow David really intersting Idea "Setting a different render per
object".