Unbiased Rendering - over rated?

JoeMamma2000

Rashad Carter said:

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..

Rashad, if I could figure out what point you're trying to make I'd respond to this. But I can't. So I won't. :) :) Something about "being placated". Other than that I'm not sure.

Rashad Carter said:

Because so far all you've done is to argue that unbiased rendering actually has no place at all in the hobbyist market.

Rashad, do me a favor and actually READ what I post, and TRY to understand what I'm saying. Because I NEVER, EVER, even hinted that unbiased rendering has no place at all in the hobbyist market.

My point is, and always has been in this forum, very simple. It is this: "People here should open their minds to a whole other world of stuff out there, and instead of blindly focusing on just one technology (like Carrara), try to LEARN and UNDERSTAND what's behind all of this 3D stuff in the real world."

That's it. That's my point. It's been the same point for all the years I've posted here. And all I get in response is arguments about why people don't want to open their minds, they just want to play with software and not learn about other techniques and skills. Yes, there are a few exceptions, but mostly the result of my attempts is bruised egos and hurt feelings. And yes, I'm fully aware that all of that is my fault and everybody else here is totally perfect and mature in all of their dealings.

Now, re-read the point I outlined above. Okay, now re-read it again. I'm not attacking you or any software. I'm not. I'm not calling you names, or trying to discredit anyone or anything. I am MERELY trying to open people's eyes to another world out there that most are totally unfamiliar with. There is no need to respond, as most do, with childish attempts to discredit me. Just use the useful stuff and discard the rest, okay? If you don't believe what I say, then fine. I really don't care.

Rashad Carter said:

While on some level you might have some degree of open-mindedness, you seem often closed as well.

As usual with you and others here, you can't stick to the issues, you need to characterize those who don't agree with you as bad people.

Try not to do that, huh?

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.

I NEVER said you always should do something one way or the other. In fact, as you can see if you re-read the main point I mentioned above, I'm all about OPENING YOUR MIND AND TRYING NEW THINGS. I don't care whatsoever whether you use postwork or compositing. I am, once again, merely trying to get people to OPEN THEIR EYES and consider there are many ways to get a good result.

If you feel personally attacked or something just because I suggest you consider something else, then that's your problem not mine.

Also, I want to state that Renderman Compliance is almost meaningless here in the Daz3d market.

Renderman compliance?? Huh???? What are you talking about??

You and others over the years have strongly suggested, or outright stated, that unbiased is "more realistic" than biased. I merely gave an example of how one biased technology (Renderman) is used on countless Hollywood feature films because it is very good, and has a track record of delivering what the theater-going audience of zillions of people have accepted as "real". That's all. Renderman compliance is totally irrelevant. Biased renderers, as well as a myriad of other filmmaking techniques, have been successful in delivering audiences into other worlds for decades. If that's not real enough for you, then that's your problem. The world of theater goers might disagree.

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.

You must be joking.

There are so many things that are either irrelevant or incorrect about this that I'm at a loss for where to begin. So I won't.

DADA_universe

This guy here (watch from 1:28:55 to 1:35:00) makes a strong case for why unbiased rendering is likely to play a bigger role in the future of CGI. I like the fact that he looks at it from the perspective that even if you're not gunning for photorealism, it's a great place to start and probably easier to get realism out of the box, and then figure out what you want to tweak to get the stylized effect you desire. That's sort of turning the way CG has been approached on it's head, and the rate at which powerful tools that make this possible are now being made accessible, two years from now, we might be having a very different conversation here about rendering, many of the things being argued about here having been made redundant.......or maybe not.

Dondec

magaremoto said:

... 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/

Interesting read, thanks for posting.

- Don

Dondec

DADA_universe said:

This guy here (watch from 1:28:55 to 1:35:00) makes a strong case for why unbiased rendering is likely to play a bigger role....

Thanks for sharing... wow, there's some pretty amazing things going on there. Watched the whole thing. You know I have to wonder, after seeming their real time GI lighting features, whether the free version of Unity could be used for renders and animations, like we are using Carrara for now. I doubt it, otherwise they would have said. Still, its worth following huh.

Personally I had no immediate interest in making games, but when that one dude said he was pulling in $64K a month, well... you do tend to take notice. :)

Thanks again

- Don

PhilW

I can't see any reason why you could not use Unity for rendering and animation and not a game format - I think Wendy is already doing some of this? There seems to be an industry move towards providing high end tools for free to individuals (eg. Unity and Fusion) presumably in the hope that some of these will progress to paying customers, and it pushes them to being the de facto standard in that market.

MarkBremmer

Unity is awesome. ;-)

DADA_universe

Don.deCourcelle said:

DADA_universe said:

This guy here (watch from 1:28:55 to 1:35:00) makes a strong case for why unbiased rendering is likely to play a bigger role....

Thanks for sharing... wow, there's some pretty amazing things going on there. Watched the whole thing. You know I have to wonder, after seeming their real time GI lighting features, whether the free version of Unity could be used for renders and animations, like we are using Carrara for now. I doubt it, otherwise they would have said. Still, its worth following huh.

Personally I had no immediate interest in making games, but when that one dude said he was pulling in $64K a month, well... you do tend to take notice. :)

Thanks again

- Don

Yep, like PhilW said, and like this video demonstrates, it's eminently possible to render out animations from Unity. You can create your animation in Carrara or whatever other app you use, export as fbx and import it into Unity where you can augment it in all sorts of ways before rendering it out, but like in all things, there's a learning curve involved, and you will have to familiarize yourself with writing code in Javascript or C#. You can't get the best out of the engine without coding, for example, I've been unable to find any other way to output image files from Unity without running some code. But there are many possibilities all the same, including 'mistakenly' making some cool money from a game you 'mistakenly' made while only trying to render out animation!

Mythmaker

DADA_universe said:

Yep, like PhilW said, and like this video demonstrates, it's eminently possible to render out animations from Unity. You can create your animation in Carrara or whatever other app you use, export as fbx and import it into Unity where you can augment it in all sorts of ways before rendering it out, but like in all things, there's a learning curve involved, and you will have to familiarize yourself with writing code in Javascript or C#.

Unity environment with real-time responsiveness is very sexy - especially if we have been constantly deprived off interactive viewport feedback here in shadow-less Carrara...

And indeed...for CG app animations there will still be involved learning curve in everything else - shaders, custom props import pipeline, formats translations, UI learning, CG-mindset unlearning, and especially resource management...

I can see how game engine editors with the right Timeline/ Scene Manager plugins can be super attractive to DIY modeler/ texturer /rigger /animator... quickly lay out your scene on ready-to-go stage, no render button to hit, just output images.

But for canned content users, V4 or V5 and their joint movement won't look as hot when game-engine optimized/ compromised. Then one has to learn to think like a game developer = time is spent on endless budgeting and planning ahead. Which goes against the whole idea of playing director in "ready-to-render" world...

I went from sandbox games to game editor machinima to iClone to DS to search for renderers then ended up here. I realize I'm better off making my own interactive environment... I feel freer, no constant pixel and vertex diet.

-----------------

Keeping this close to the OP...I'm not a lighting purist, tend to make creative use of what I have, so not too concerned about biased/unbiased. Unless the style is "irreverent punk" (pioneered by the amazing Wendy), I wouldn't bother chasing stylistic realism using alpha-mapped hair on SSS skin, the contrast made more jarring in unforgiving Octane/ Lux/ Reality/ Iray light...

As a "gamer-gen" animator I base my renderer choice on two things: pro-level render speed and viewport responsiveness...

Viewport render has seen amazing recent advancement, but here in Daz zone it's still stuck at marque drag generation. You can have the most HD displacement wrinkles or detailed skin...but if What You See is Rarely What You Get , it is just not artist-friendly. Definitely inefficient - as posing/ animating characters or anything is tedious without reference shadows or textures of sufficient fidelity. That's why I'm still seduced by Unity and UE4, why Carrarists continue to drool at LightWave's beautiful real-time viewport, why DS users find Genesis in iClone so much sexier than Genesis in Carrara...

Shadows...all we need are some shadows and a picturesque Assembly World, to keep the focus over here not over there... :)

Dondec

Mythmaker said:

I went from sandbox games to game editor machinima to iClone to DS to search for renderers then ended up here. I realize I'm better off making my own interactive environment... I feel freer, no constant pixel and vertex

I too was searching around, and I have to admit that the one brief animation I created in IClone 5.5 was the fastest animation system I ever worked on. But as you mentioned the figures are optimized and don't have the beauty they were originally born with.

IClone 6 also has a Luxus style render plugin called Indigo which does unbiased renders, but in my tests was exceedingly slow to the point of being a big dissatisfier. The reason I started this thread was because I was so unimpressed with unbiased rendering at that point.

But the IClone graphic-card rendering, cloth sim and Mocap mixing features are very cool and fast, and I started to see the bigger picture. IClone was just another "tool", good for cooking fast animations with mocap, not so good for beautiful renders or realistic scenes.

I started working on a 2nd IClone animation and decided to create all my background environments (mountains, clouds, terrain) elsewhere - composite them in. That's what led me here. I rendered a few DAZ props in Carrara and the quality really surprised me, actually I couldn't believe it... Carrara? Holy Smoke! Even the little demo environments that comes with the package, the ones you see when the popup windows opens to create a new project, looked pretty good, if not believable, with no or minor tweaks.

Around this time I discovered Infinite Skills and PhilW's training videos. I think DAZ owes a huge debt to Phil for explaining Carrara the way he did in those vids. They really helped me get my head around the program fast, and it just reinforces my belief that the battle among 3D applications will be fought through education.

So finally I'm get a better picture of Unity now too. Fast viewport and graphic card rendering, like IClone, but with higher quality (real time GI), but with a much steeper learning curve (writing code). Same dependence on "optimized" figure and prop models, probably pretty hard limits on memory usage, and (I think) no direct animation output (like individual TIF frames, etc) without writing code. If I got this wrong, let me know.

Thanks

- Don

PhilW

Don.deCourcelle said:

Around this time I discovered Infinite Skills and PhilW's training videos. I think DAZ owes a huge debt to Phil for explaining Carrara the way he did in those vids. They really helped me get my head around the program fast, and it just reinforces my belief that the battle among 3D applications will be fought through education.
- Don

Very kind of you to say so, thank you!

Mythmaker

Don.deCourcelle said:

IClone 6 also has a Luxus style render plugin called Indigo which does unbiased renders, but in my tests was exceedingly slow to the point of being a big dissatisfier. The reason I started this thread was because I was so unimpressed with unbiased rendering at that point.
I bought the iClone6+indigo package at a promo rate. I've since decided that any pro-level external renderer, unbiased or not, remains an overkill for iClone's game resolution content. A tightly integrated native biased renderer like Carrara's would've been easier transition to their users. That's why I'm here and not over there...

IClone was just another "tool", good for cooking fast animations with mocap, not so good for beautiful renders or realistic scenes.

I rendered a few DAZ props in Carrara and the quality really surprised me, actually I couldn't believe it... Carrara? Holy Smoke! Even the little demo environments that comes with the package, the ones you see when the popup windows opens to create a new project, looked pretty good, if not believable, with no or minor tweaks.

Carrara is smart but very shy.

IClone and Carrara has opposite virtues and shortcomings.
IClone6 has responsive real-time visual feedback of almost everything in the viewport, animations, textures, shadows, just no native renderer.
Carrara has everything a budget CG generalist would need, just no responsive real-time visual feedback of almost everything in the viewport.

The most ironic thing is, Genesis looks better in iClone not because iClone has better "real" renderer than Carrara, just more updated viewport... Carrara could easily "achieve" that...

Puppeteer - a DAZ specialty - gets sexier presentation in iClone too. Unlike the Carrara "after thought" version. Ironic...

my belief that the battle among 3D applications will be fought through education.

Agreed... I'm 3 months new to this scene, lots of high quality tutors, paid or volunteer. Do note that Carrara is apparently a companion app to the superstar app that is Daz Studio + Content Store. The equally hot but not so famous child of the Daz family lol...

So finally I'm get a better picture of Unity now too.

You're getting the big picture already...

My big pic based on the goal of creating animation...of CONSISTENT style. To me, it is your artistic style, AND workflow preference, that drive the decision of the main app. It's hard to not be distracted by all these shiny stuff and expert opinions, lol, I understand...

The macro trend is game-driven. So yes in the longer run, GPU render, realtime (game editors) or near-real-time (CG app plugins).
Biased or unbiased, is a matter of SUBJECTIVE preference.
Unbiased = stylistic consistency.
Biased = conventional CG, freedom to fake it.
Indigo/ Octane workflow can fast or slow or fun or painful, all depends on plugin-app integration.
Unity or UE or Source or Cryengine all offer real-time interactive workflow. Artists love realtime feedback. But comes at a price = game content pipeline.
Game content pipeline is HEFTY. Most beginner animator, especially non-modelers, underestimates the amount of asset management involved. Game asset is the biggest chunk of sandbox/ open world games budget.
Scripting coding will help game editor mastery but is another matter.

So using Unity to render because it has PBR, is highly subjective. Too much "it depends on your needs, artistic, skill set and budget". :)

I'm a former modder and level designer, so I feel at home in game editors for experimental stuff. But for purposeful art it's better economy to work in a traditional CG app environment. So good to not have to worry about thinking ahead on map exporting budget, shrinking 5K buildings into 1K, and so fun to tweak vertices on the fly...

My main grouse here is viewport unresponsiveness and creating in abstract. This is a Carrara issue, not traditional CG app issue. Then again maybe you don't even notice it because you have good imagination. Most game generation artists won't put up with it. I hope this can be improved so Carrara will get attract more Daz content store customers.

Wow I'm in a chatty mood lol

EDIT: just want to add, I haven't had time to read all but the responses on biased/unbiased the first page of this topic are among the best and most concise I've seen on this topic

PhilW

Having just finished a big animation project with Carrara (well,almost..), I would second a request for a much more responsive interface. Particularly when you have multiple characters in a scene, it can slow to a crawl, and when you move the mouse and a limb moves a second or so later is not conducive to setting up animation. But I got there in the end, and Carrara is the environment I feel most comfortable using.

TangoAlpha

Rashad Carter said:

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.

The Boxtrolls (2014) was stop motion, as was Shaun the Sheep (2015). It's definitely alive and well as a technique. :) The new Thunderbirds Are Go TV series is an interesting combination of 3d CG Character animation against 'live' miniatures (done by WETA Digital in Wellington). All motion controlled cameras & stuff.

mikael-aronsson

Stop motion is very cheap compared to CG, about half the price so it will live on for some time I think (and hope), and with todays 3D printing tech. they can do hundreds of replacement heads/faces for lots of expressions (Coraline style) at a low price.

AJ2112

Very good thread. My opinion is, it all comes down to power of pc. Not everyone can afford high dollor, high quality pc parts. I was just researching some video cards, decent cards are $300 plus, some people systems run dual cards or quad cards, etc...... There are $2000 video cards on the market.

After upgrading my pc from dual core to eight core, I noticed blazing difference in rendering speeds using 3Delight. My dual core system constantly froze up or crashed DS during rendering of Suite 2101 Eight core system renders with no issues at all, in a few minutes. My dual core took forever to render in Luxrender, image was grainy for half an hour. Now with eight core system, same image clears up one/two minutes. Majority of my Lux images rendered in 15-30 minutes on my art thread. Also memory was increased from 2GB to 16GB, 32 bit system to 64 bit, etc.....

So, personally I don't believe any render engine is particulary faster, or better. I believe it all come's down to the power of a computer system, and 3D knowledge of artist, to utilize pc power/render engine to thier advantage. As we all know as technology progresses forward, we do our best to keep up with technology. Character models have advanced in the past few yrs, now being presented as HD, model textures, lighting, etc.... all have advanced. Most do not take the time to read specifications of software, content, etc.... Anyway don't want to write a book, Lol !!!!

PhilW

With the advances in computing power, today's $300 video card is tomorrow's $100 card - and of course there will be a new $300 card that will be X times more powerful. Which continuously opens the doors to newer and better software techniques. I believe we are seeing a revolution in the way that 3D graphics are rendered, for the majority of users.

Szark

over rated well it depends on what you want to render

WendyLuvsCatz

I can render foliage balls in seconds, is another reason why I like Octane

PhilW

Wendy - very pretty!

scottidog2

2015 is the year of PBR

Tutorial: PBR Texture Conversion

Table of Contents

PBR: Misconceptions and Myths
PBR: What Has Changed?
Traditional Content Recap
Conversion: Traditional -> PBR Specular
Metalness Workflow vs Specular Workflow
Conversion: Specular -> Metalness
Conversion: Metalness -> Specular
Comparisons and Disclaimers
Material Logic

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-conversion

Headwax

wendy♥catz said:

I can render foliage balls in seconds, is another reason why I like Octane

that;s the best foliage ball I ever seen !
I am off to make one, thanks Wendy, you rip!

3drendero

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but unbiased renderers like Luxrender and Octane can turn Carrara into an engineering or physics tool for optical simulation.

Using a real car light guide, I got a perfect match with the first render in Luxrender, since the parameters are the same as the real world.

Maybe it could have also been done in the native Carrara renderer, but matching the real world light with non-physical parameters would take a lot longer.

Attachment shows a simple light guide from WinOSi.

Cyberdene

MarkBremmer said:

 

 

Rashad Carter said:

 

Don.deCourcelle said:

I get the impression that unbiased renders create the picture IT wants to create for you… kind of a “what you get is what you get” sort of thing. Its so pristine and realistic, you hardly want to change anything about it. It is already perfect, so don’t you dare paint over it… you’re messing with reality here.

 

Unbiased engines display the true work that the artist has "actually" done. What you see isn't what Octane wanted to show you, its what you gave Octane to work with. What you get out is a direct result of what you put in. It is a lot like cooking, because like cooking, you are dealing with physical laws that are consistent. Results are much easier to repeat and to share with colleagues.

Whereas, again, I get the impression that a biased render gets you closer to building the image that YOU steer toward yourself, and in that sense, you create yourself. You’re eye is the judge, your sense of lighting, shadows, all that. In this sense biased renders are “more artistic” because you design the look of the final image yourself.

In you’re opinion would this be correct or incorrect thinking? Thanks in advance.
- Don

 

More artistic is a hard sell for me. Indeed, the biased engine allows me to create more fantasy materials and such sure. But due to slow rendering and the need for lots of sample test renders I'm also going to be less likely to employ depth of field, or full GI, which to me are detrimental omissions for the artist. Any "option" that the artist has to rule out for any reason is to my mind a limitation being placed that shouldn't be there. So while rendering unbiased I might lose the ability to make things glow arbitrarily, I by contrast also gain the ability to render with DOF and other cool effects I would have otherwise avoided. So I would say my final vision is probably more realized in the unbiased engine than in the biased one.

And it is important to accept that most people new to CG "assume" on the most basic level their render engine is unbiased by nature... just like we assume the rights and wrongs we are raised with to be unbiased. Only when we get older do we look back and acknowledge the biases of our upbringings. To realize that mom said don't eat that because she doesnt like it, not because there is actually anything wrong with this particular food. They assume that if they add a light source to a scene that the light it creates will behave as it does in nature. It is only after spending some time with the tool that users then learn to know when these lights behave naturally and when they don't, and how to compensate for it.

Unbiased render engines are much more predictable in general, I agree. But that is the strength of it.

If you were starting out brand new today in 3d cg rendering with no previous experience with other engines, an unbiased render engine will be more intuitive and easier to learn by a long shot. Light behaves the same way in Octane as it tends to in real life, so as new user who only has experiences with the real world to draw upon, Octane gives results exactly like those you'd expect. This means that even with very little knowledge of 3d and cg, I can still churn out a decent quality render.

Again, this is all related to realism. If realism isnt the primary goal, then unbiased really doesn't offer any advantages.

 

Telling it like it is, someone said there is no such thing as a bad rendered, I call total BS on that comment. If it's slow? Trust me by defaul that sh*t is bad. Period. I've used biased renderers on super high end machines that still took a few hours to complete. That's just freakin sad.

Cyberdene

Dondec said:

Rashad,

Man, these write ups are really getting into it, and you make some very strong points. That point about the skin and other materials being flawed is IMPORTANT. Thank you.

Let me go in a different direction for a moment.

I get the impression that unbiased renders create the picture IT wants to create for you… kind of a “what you get is what you get” sort of thing. Its so pristine and realistic, you hardly want to change anything about it. It is already perfect, so don’t you dare paint over it… you’re messing with reality here.

Whereas, again, I get the impression that a biased render gets you closer to building the image that YOU steer toward yourself, and in that sense, you create yourself. You’re eye is the judge, your sense of lighting, shadows, all that. In this sense biased renders are “more artistic” because you design the look of the final image yourself.

In you’re opinion would this be correct or incorrect thinking? Thanks in advance.
- Don

Man F*** that, I don't even care about all that post work crap. When I get commissions people come to me sometimes and they want like a 50 page comic book I need something that renders fast, I remember it took me almost 4 months to finish a comic, and because Poser is so damn slow I rarely even bother to do comics or large scenes at all anymore. Yet someone using OCtane can do that many pages in a friggin day. There are lots of people that still post work regardless of the engine they use. 

FifthElement

Every time I almost forget one of these uterrly useless discussions where JoeMamma (who never had any renders to show for) contributed his infinite "wisdom", there is always someone to ressurect it for no good reason but to remind us that (?)(well, I lost my train of thought there...), thanks man 

Rashad Carter

...this is the song that never ends,...

yes it goes on and on my friend.

Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,

and they'll continue singing it forever just because...

...this is the song....

 

Lucky for Cyberdene, the thread has long since gone to sleep. I bet cyberdene was looking ofr information when the forum search turned up this thread. Sorry about that; Cyberdene.