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...................... maybe if he just posted a few more renders in any engine
The fact is that the motion picture CG/VFX industry has used Renderman, an unbiased renderer for decades. ILM uses it, Pixar uses it. Others use it. The list of feature films that have been made using biased renderers for the last two or three decades is HUGE. If you don't believe that, then I'm not surprised, because for some reason the folks in this forum tend to believe what they want. Even if the facts don't support it. That's not my problem Rashad.
You are free to believe that unbiased renderers are required for realism, but you've given no information whatsoever to support that belief.
I have used unbiased renderers in about 5 applications over the years. And IMO they are useful in certain situations. VERY useful in certain situations. But as I said before, it's not, as many hobbyists want to believe, a "one or the other" proposition. Like any tool in the VFX world, you use what is best for the project at hand. I am not against unbiased renderers, I am merely trying to get the people here to THINK and UNDERSTAND instead of blindly doing stuff that doesn't make sense for them. Unbiased renderers are great and wonderful. But they may not be necessary depending upon what you're doing. That's all I'm saying.
The major studios are in recent years stepping outside of Renderman and the other standard renderers, and looking at other solutions, some of which are unbiased. But with the studios it's FAR more complicated. They take the best of what's available, and apply individual solutions on individual projects as needed.
But in this forum all of that is irrelevant. People want to play with unbiased renderers, so go ahead and play.
The fact is that the motion picture CG/VFX industry has used Renderman, an unbiased renderer for decades. ILM uses it, Pixar uses it. Others use it. The list of feature films that have been made using biased renderers for the last two or three decades is HUGE. If you don't believe that, then I'm not surprised, because for some reason the folks in this forum tend to believe what they want. Even if the facts don't support it. That's not my problem Rashad.
You are free to believe that unbiased renderers are required for realism, but you've given no information whatsoever to support that belief.
I have used unbiased renderers in about 5 applications over the years. And IMO they are useful in certain situations. VERY useful in certain situations. But as I said before, it's not, as many hobbyists want to believe, a "one or the other" proposition. Like any tool in the VFX world, you use what is best for the project at hand. I am not against unbiased renderers, I am merely trying to get the people here to THINK and UNDERSTAND instead of blindly doing stuff that doesn't make sense for them. Unbiased renderers are great and wonderful. But they may not be necessary depending upon what you're doing. That's all I'm saying.
The major studios are in recent years stepping outside of Renderman and the other standard renderers, and looking at other solutions, some of which are unbiased. But with the studios it's FAR more complicated. They take the best of what's available, and apply individual solutions on individual projects as needed.
But in this forum all of that is irrelevant. People want to play with unbiased renderers, so go ahead and play.
Maybe you can expand on what you mean when you say unbiased render engines can be VERY useful for certain situations? What exactly are those "situations?" And what do you mean by VERY useful?
Rashad,
You're trying to simplify something that is not simple. Each renderer has strengths, and each renderer has weaknesses. Some are really good at SSS, so if you have a scene that need great SSS you might jump to Arnold. If you need great caustics you might try something else. It depends. I know people want to make it an all or nothing, and make it real simple, but it's not.
The proposition that "realism = unbiased" is wrong. Very wrong. That is a vastly gross oversimplification and misunderstanding of what it takes to make viewers believe that what they're seeing really happened. If you're in a fast animation with lots of movement, you can get away with stuff that, if a still image, would look cartoonish. But since it's in motion, viewers might not notice. It's about textures, and modelling and lighting. It's about compositing to make it all seem real. That's how VFX and film production companies have been transporting people to other worlds for decades. And it works, and unbiased renderers have nothing to do with it.
But if your interest is merely that of what I call a "gadget freak" who enjoys the latest processors and graphics cards and render software just because it's fun, then that's fine. But it's not what's important in the real world. There is an entire world of tools out there that people use to make their productions believable, and they work fine. And if they don't work for a particular scene or effect, then they look elsewhere.
It depends.
Then there's "real" and "photoreal". In the real world, we see in 3D, so easy to separate your focal interest from the background. People don't walk around the mall rimlighted, ears glowing and the background out of focus. These are photographic tricks to make the subject pop, which is necessary in 2D.
Unbiased renders imitate camera tricks easier than biased - for some really good examples, take a look at http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/top-10-blender-artworks-february-2015/. Do they look "real"? Possibly. Do they look glossy magazine "photoreal"? Very definitely!
And not a single realistic human to be seen :)
Let me give just one example of why unbiased renderers might be irrelevant to someone seeking "realism".
Below is a video I posted a link to before showing a revolutionary facial rigging system. And the average person would look at that video and think that someone is manipulating a real face.
Yeah, we can argue about how "real" it looks, but for most viewers I suspect it's probably in the 98% real category. And do you know why it looks so real?
Not because of the renderer, but because of the fact that its a head scan with an excellent skin texture and wrinkle maps. The DETAIL is what makes it real. It looks like a real head, and real skin, and real pores, and real eyes and REAL EXPRESSIONS. The lighting and rendering becomes somewhat irrelevant because all the other factors are there.
That's my point. "Realism" is only 10% about the renderer, and 90% about all the other stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qeOFibRmoo
I have been filmmaker for more than forty years, I almost made all my professional career with silver-halide films (Eastman Kodak).
I passed very late to video (for technical reasons of projections in theaters).
I was always accustomed to a “warm” image and the digital support strongly disappointed me by its qualities of very synthetic and cold images.
I believe that it is the warmth of render of Carrara which I like more, but I understand that somebody wich always knew the synthetic image tries to approach to the maximum of another real synthetic image.
Since I carry out films in video, I use all the possible techniques to finalize the real images more “movie-like” and in 3D, I really like the built'in renders of Carrara for this reason.
You need both ;o) an unbiased renderer is cool for still images and very nice rendering, if you do animation (as some kind of hobby user), you don't want it, it's too slow no matter what you do, a biased renderer can do it all, it's just more work, and the art in doing animation is to learn how to cheat, you almost never have the time to do it right, you have to cheat and an unbiased renderer don't cheat that good so it gets useless ;o)
Motion blur and DOF is your friend for animation, you can hide a lot of things with it, if you need "true" realistic animations you need the resources to do that and in that case you don't have a problem, well, maybe to carry your heavy wallet or purse...
We have both, be happy for that and use the one that fits your goal best, there is no one renderer to rule them all.
Well said. IMHO, including IRAY in DAZ studio simply expands our options and this is a VERY GOOD THING. I have seen nowhere in these forums that DAZ3D is going to stop including or supporting 3Delight. In fact I do believe that it was stated that they had extended their license for 3Delight. Simply put, we have been given another tool for our toolbox that will allow us to create new and different things.
I love IRAY. I will use it when what I am trying to create calls for its use. I am also still, like many others, working at coming to grips with how it does things. I also love 3Delight. I have not achieved anywhere near what could be called "mastery" with that engine either.
For me, and I suspect many others, BOTH tools have a place in my toolbox and I am VERY happy to have both of them build into one software package so that I can switch between them basically at will. There are things that I can do in 3Delight that I cannot do in IRAY and vice versa.
I am very glad to have both options
Yes, OK, but when you make a film, you must respect a visual continuity from the beginning until the end and I could read that these render engines doesn't take into account the hair.
What about particles, replicated objects, clouds, fog, ocean, etc..?
Have no idea about IRAY, but 3delight can do most of it:
You can do hair with for example: http://www.daz3d.com/look-at-my-hair (but I assume you talk about dynamic hair, and that is a different beast).
Fog can be done in DS
Replicated objects is no problem.
Particles is not easy with DS even if 3delight itself support it, but I am not sure the version in DS does.
But for more serious animations DS may not be the the best solution there are other tools better suited for that, the animation tools in DS is not the best in the world, you need dynamics for almost any kind of film/animation making, otherwise things will look silly or be very hard to do (hair, cloth, wind, water).
Actually unbiased renderers can sometimes be faster for stills and animation AND give better quality, but it depends on lighting, settings etc. For many things in an biased renderer like Carrara's native one, the solution is to calculate more light paths (=more time). Antialiasing is done by calculating more light paths. You want global illumination, that's quite a few more light paths to calculate per pixel. Soft shadows would be another multiplier. Real depth of field, and we multiply again by a fairly big factor. Motion blur - and that's another multiplier. Soft reflections, etc, etc. And you need to tell the renderer in advance how many light paths (or quality of a particular feature) you want in advance of seeing the results, and they all need to be specified in advance of seeing the results. So it is easy to specify too high and get enormous render times for little actual return in terms of the final image.
All of these factors are calculated by an unbiased render engine based on a sampling approach, so you don't need to specify any of them in advance, you just need to look at the image and tell it when the noise has reduced to an acceptable level. That threshold can be very different between a still render and an animation, as a bit of grain on a single frame will not be noticed at 24 fps (or whatever you are running at). So for a fast moving animation, you may be able to get away with 100-200 samples per pixel which will render in a fraction of the time that it would take in a biased renderer to achieve the same result.
Of course, you may not need all of these effects at once, and many users of biased renderers have got very skilled at using only those which will really impact the image, or using work-arounds ("cheats") for some aspects in order to manage render times.
I for one will continue to use both, and often combine the best of both for a final image or animation. It is good to have the choice.
Thanks, this list reminded me of a few things that I was going to note. With regard to Octane, my responses will be specific the the Carrara plugin as the current state of the DS plugin is well behind the curve, and many of the new features in 2.0 aren't supported yet.
Render Passes:
There was a question about the support/availability of render passes in unbiased render engines earlier. Both Octane and Iray have the ability to save Render Passes. I couldn't find a way to setup render passes with DS/Iray, so it may not be implemented yet. Octane has an extensive set of render pass options - all available via the Carrara plugin (see attached images for the full list). Here are links to videos about render passes in each application:
Octane - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIEa2g_FwNw
Iray - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M-nDVUDD1c
Hair and fur:
Octane - has native hair/fur. Unfortunately it does not work with Carrara dynamic hair since DAZ 3D has not implemented Dynamic Hair in the SDK - so developers currently do not have access to Dynamic hair.
Iray - Not available from DS - the only references I could find were via the Maya plugin, and required enabling the geometry option in Maya (meaning Iray is rendering geometry from Maya)
Motion Blur:
Octane: Yes (available in the Carrara plugin)
Iray: Yes (does not appear to be available in the DS plugin yet)
DOF:
Octane: Yes (available in Carrara plugin)
Iray: Yes (available in the DS plugin)
Fog and Gods Rays:
Octane: Yes (available in Carrara plugin)
Iray: Yes (available in the DS plugin)
(both use SSS scatter for fog and gods rays)
Particles:
Octane: Limited via the Carrara plugin - as long as the particle generator uses objects which pass geometry to the renderer particles will render in Octane
Iray: Not available in DS, so not available in Iray
Water/Oceans:
Ocatne: Carrara animated oceans/water work as expected, though for best results Octane shaders should be used
Iray: Any water object should render fine with the appropriate shaders
True "Native" Volumetrics/Particles:
Octane: will be available in version 3
"Volumetric rendering: OctaneRender 3 supports the ability to render particulate matter such as clouds, smoke, fog, and fire with varying densities and introduces a unique native primitive type for incredibly detailed micro-surface displacement volumes and surfaces required to render photorealistic natural and organic materials. Dreamworks’ OpenVDB is also supported for direct in-camera rendering of particle simulations."
Iray: no
Replication/Instancing:
Octane: Yes, but only basic replication/instancing. For example, the nested instancing of Carrara trees requires a bit of user intervention, which means that the leaves end up without replication/instancing
Iray: Couldn't find any definitive info
Hopefully you will find this a bit helpful.
Some of the videos posted in this thread were pretty amazing ... real eye openers.
There was one, I think the OTOY seminar... I could barely believe what I was seeing. I'm now getting the impression we are witnessing the beginnings of the next era in 3D. I even went and checked out what a Titan Black cost on Amazon. Pretty top dollar... and I guess you need more than one... or... or do I?
Should I wish to starting planning my entre toward Octane, what kind of motherboard do I need for multiple video cards like that. I think my venerable i7 accepts exactly one video card, and know it pretty well.. I hand built that from ordered parts.
So exactly what do you need... a new PC with multiple video slots or something?
This has been pretty educational... thank you all very much
- Don
You certainly do not NEED more than one video card, but Octane scales to use what is available, so two identical cards will render twice as fast. I am currently using a 2GB card with a laptop and can get good results pretty fast (although not nearly as fast as some cards!). Others will doubtless give their recommendations and will know more about it than me, but just to say that you don't have to spend the Earth, but obviously the more you can afford, the more you will be able to do. As Octane now supports out of core textures, one potential hurdle has been removed.
Again, people tend to have an extremely narrow view in their evaluation of renderers. And they fail to take a broad view and realize that when you want a given effect there are multiple ways to get it. You can choose to have your biased renderer do it, or have an unbiased renderer do it, or use a myriad of compositing techniques to do it, or use a "live action" shot to to it, and on and on.
People tend to think "Hmmm, the biased/unbiased renderer takes a long time with this effect, so I shouldn't use a biased/unbiased renderer". Again, that's a misguided belief. You can render parts of your image with one renderer, other parts with another renderer, add other parts from a "live action" photograph or video, and so on. That's what professional artists do.
But hobbyists seems to prefer to view things with blinders on and get caught up in the "my renderer is bigger than your renderer" debates, rather than looking for the best overall solution for each issue. If your renderer is taking too long on something, or not giving the best result, then try something else. You might end up deciding to use a biased renderer for 90% of your render, and an unbiased renderer for that "difficult to get right" part of the image, and maybe a photo for another part, and some compositing techniques to improve the apparent "realism" of it all, and so on.
I posted an example recently where I composited an image of a surfer diving under a wave, her hair flowing in the water. Now, I could have spent ages trying to get Carrara to come up with something that looked kinda sorta but not really anything like real hair flowing under water, or do what I did, and composite an image of real hair. Why spend days tweaking and rendering to get something that looks nothing like real hair, when you can do a composite which takes far less time and looks 10 times better? Yeah, I know, suddenly there's concern about copyright and stuff like that, but I think that's just an excuse for people not wanting to stray outside their Carrara world.
Stuff like DOF, fog, fire, smoke, particles, blurred reflections, etc., and all of those cool features which can take a long time to do in any given renderer, can be done using other methods, far better and much faster. So why even bother using an unbiased or biased renderer and wasting your time on it?
I realize I'll never change any minds here, cuz it's the process of software evaluation that people seem to enjoy, but for what it's worth that's my 2 cents.
As I said later in the same post, I often combine parts from both renderers to get the results that I want. And JonStark has shown combining hair animated in Carrara with a figure animation done with Octane. So at least some of us are with you on using the best of both worlds.
More than he thinks actually- but as Joe is fond of pointing out, people and attitudes here never change. ;-)
Wink, wink... ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-)
Nudge, nudge... :) :) :)
Not sure about the rest of you but I think Evil was implying something without actually saying it....am I right? :) :) :) :)
Maybe not. It was kinda sly the way he said it. :) :)
But at least it wasn't another photo of cow manure... :) :)
Would you mind detailing your current system specs? This information could be useful in helping you decide which way to go. We need to know the mother board product number, cpu processor, ram definitions, and so forth. Sometimes all you need is to replace a single part. Other times an entirely different philosophy is required leading to entirely new computer systems altogether.
Most likely, your current system could be modified to perform quite well with Octane.
Also, if you are considering Octane, then I suggest you hold off a bit until OctaneRender v3 is released in the fall of this year. Along with volumetrics, the newer Octane will also work with AMD cards so there is no more need to rely on Nvidia specific cards which will save you a lot of money.
As far as motherboards, I'd be really surprised if your current board only had a single slot for a graphics card. At least most Desktop PC's have more than one slot, but laptops might be different.
But I think that before you go spending that kind of money you should see how you like unbiased rendering in general and you could do that with Iray. If you like Iray, then you will surely LOVE Octane, as it is Iray but with many more tools.
Best of luck.
Rashad, while I'm tempted to buy while the Euro is down, I'll probably wait. I'm having too much fun with Carrara as is at the moment, and would like to continue learning figure posing, garment and figure conversions, fit-to, compositing figures with PS/AE, and other little tricky little bits that keep me up at night :)
Expect a PM with system specs though. Thanks for your help!
- Don
Joe,
You didn't answer my question, you instead decided to caution me about oversimplifying, which I can agree with. But you still havent answered my question.
If I had been thinking like you, I would have assumed the above poster wouldn't have answered the question for fear that they would end up making positive statements quite similar to those they are currently attempting to discredit. It's as if the poster made the "usefulness" comments to placate the unbiased supporters early in the post, but ultimately, the post is unfavorable toward unbiased rendering. Maybe placation wasn't the goal. As a reader in this case I'd prefer specifics, this way I know I'm not being placated.
Tell me in your own words what the benefits of unbiased rendering are, please. Because so far all you've done is to argue that unbiased rendering actually has no place at all in the hobbyist market. Please clarify.
On another issue you mentioned in one of my posts....I find that unbiased is not the ONLY option for realism, of course not, but it is certainly the BEST option. It's the simple matter of design. Unbiased render engines are more efficient at realism by design. Please tell me you wont argue with that too.
Lastly Joe, I want to caution you. While on some level you might have some degree of open-mindedness, you seem often closed as well. For example, just because YOU personally desire to do DOF in photoshop doesn't mean the rest of us should always do it in post as well. If we want to rig the DOF in the native render engine then we should be allowed to do that without feeling like it is somehow wrong according to Joe. Not every image requires compositing. As you state often, it is all on a case by case basis. So while there is more than one way to get something done, there are still preferences among those choices that will fit one individual and situation better than some other individual or situation.
DOF is one effect I think I'll rarely perform in post now that Octane does it automatically. There is no longer a render speed penalty with employing this effect, so WHY NOT allow the native engine to handle it for me? If you ask me, these are the types of advantages unbiased offers over biased. But I'll wait for you to put it into you own words.
Also, I want to state that Renderman Compliance is almost meaningless here in the Daz3d market. Renderman only offers advantages for those people skilled enough to write custom shaders and scripts and the like...trained computer programmers. The average plug and play DS user will never see any direct benefit from the renderman compliance. All the renderman compliance thing does for DS users is to make them feel in some way "connected" to Hollywood because they are using a similar tool to those of the Hollywood studios. It's more about association than direct benefit.
And Joe, I think that if you were to look back at many films of the past and compare them to modern effects the old stuff often looks quite terrible. Sure, for its day it looked great, but twenty five years later...not so much. What we consider acceptable depends on context.
For example the Ten Commandments was released before there was 3d rendering at all. All of the special effects are airbrushed like photoshop....and they look exactly like it. As if someone layered two images together. You can see the elements are not affecting one another as they would have if the scene had been real. Fast forward to the original Star Wars, and much of the space stuff was done with live models. Clearly, there is lots of compositing there too, but its not as obvious.
Gumby was done with stop motion type frames, with people literally moving the clay parts by small increments between frames. I dont think anyone is still doing it like that now. So my point to you is that just because Hollywood has done it a certain way for now doesnt mean its the best way nor does it mean that things will always be that way even in Hollywood.
If biased rendering was always good enough, then unbiased rendering would not have ever been developed. Standards change sometimes, like popularity fads.
Sorry. Wrong thread.
. . . . There are no wrong threads . . . . . Only wrong posts . . . . :lol:
although dated 2013, this quick guide could be helpful to clarify many topics stated in this thread
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-state-of-rendering-part-2/
. . . . There are no wrong threads . . . . . Only wrong posts . . . . :lol:
I meant that I should have posted my remark to another thread, meaning that, having posted it to this thread, I had to erase it and say I posted it to the "wrong thread".
I meant that I should have posted my remark to another thread, meaning that, having posted it to this thread, I had to erase it and say I posted it to the "wrong thread".
It's okay. I knew that Wendy knew, what you knew, which you just said you knew, but I already knew it, which I knew that Wendy knew, y'know? ;-P
Whew! I'm glad that's settled! :lol:
I don't think Wendy knew.
I don't think Wendy knew.
She knew if she saw the automagically generated forum e-mail that tells you there is activity in the thread you are subscribed to. So it's possible she knew, but you didn't know that she knew, but I was hip to the possibility she knew, which I knew was a possibility that you didn't know, meaning she knew, that you knew that you posted in the wrong thread, which I also knew.
I think I gave myself a headache.... :ohh: