Hardware Rendering soon for C4D...

[brammelo]

is this the same Jörn who does (did?) support for Maxon GMBH - like Björn (Srek) does?

Whoever it is: this is good news. The next step towards the professionalisation of C4D. This will of course mean that from now on we will have to know how to tweak our cards... :( Hopefully there will be a preset, like for the Quadro cards.

Cheers,
BaRa

[Katachi]

hehe, no that´s another Jörn :)

[Per-Anders]

this is excellent news! while cg is a language for the nvidia cards i hope that maybe a version that works with ATI cards might appear sometime too :D

[JoelOtron]

OK. Sorry to seem dumb, but I still dont get it--even after the Maya link. Whats the purpose and advantage of hardware rendering? Does this just mean we get more accurate editor previews? That they will appear closer to what a raytraced render would look like? Is this similar to Paul E's Sniper plugin?

I am aware that maya does hardware rendering for particle effects. Still--I never quite understood what that meant.

Could someone spell this out in non-programmer laymans terms?

Thanks!

[danb]

Sweet. That is good news. I hope my new geforce 5200 fx, bought yesterday, supports this option.

[Katachi]

Ok, the best example of hardware rendering is OpenGL for example. And with Direct3D etc. you could for example preview reflections, fresnel effects, transparencies and co in realtime by for example vertex and pixelshader that can be programmed and will be evaluated directly by the graphics card. If it would be implemented in Cinema 4D, you could see those effects directly in the editor. Just like OpenGL offers hardware lighting in Cinema 4D R8.1 for example.

[brammelo]

hardware rendering means that certain rendering operations are not performed by you regular chip, but by the chip on the graphics card. As graphics cards are very much specialized in rendering stuff, this implies a huge speed improvement. This would mean that certain render commands can actually be performed by the graphics card. This can also mean that you have a better real time visualisation.

Of course, most of the time you will have to composite stuff afterwards, but this is still a huge advantage. I think it also has a couple of advantages towards games, as games always rely on the graphics card for rendering.

O.K., now tell me I'm completely and uterly mistaken :)

Cheers,
BaRa

[kiwi]

Excellent news :thumbsup:



The excuses for the big studios to not use C4D seem to be all melting away :)




Stu.

[IanMJ]

Sounds Great!

How long has it took to get 70% done? Or more to the point, how long is the 30% expected to take? Months?

Sounds like a massive development.

[JoelOtron]

Originally posted by brammelo
Of course, most of the time you will have to composite stuff afterwards, but this is still a huge advantage.

Why would you have to composite?

Are you saying that cpu render functions would be rendered as a separate file from the functions rendered by your graphics card? Then those 2 separate renders would need to be composited together afterwards?

[brammelo]

I am assuming that you would have to composite stuff, because that's what happens in maya as well. I'm not saying you have to de facto use a compositing application to do that, it might as well be possible to do it in C4D. Wouldn't surprise me at all if that were the case :)

[mimo8]

this sound supadupa!

by the way:
I found it soo cool to share the 12point0 pluggin and even better that he and his students brought out a mac compiled version also. and he took the the time to send me the link for the mac pluggin one day after my personal email request for it.
thumbs up

sounds interesting what the do there at thehochschule bremen (http://www.l7h.cn/)

:thumbsup:

[NWoolridge]

This is great news...

In many situations, a hardware render is sufficient for final render quality, especially when there is going to be extensive post-render compositing/effects in something like AE...

And, of course, a hardware render is astonishingly faster than software render algorithms...

Hardware rendering is getting to be a big deal...

On one of the Siggraph DVDs this year was an example of realtime hardware rendering on nVidia cards (using the cg language) which essentially replicated a broadcast-res radiosity render of "Yeah: the movie". Actually, you can download the demo here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/demo_ogre.html

The programmable shaders allow for stuff like a realtime ambient occlusion map to simulate the GI lighting...

Nick

[Kirl]

Pretty cool...

I mailed him some time ago about the sailboat animation on his site and that was in fact real-time...!!!! (it had caustics, displacement, refraction, transperency and what not)

Unbelievable no...? :)

[brammelo]

Originally posted by Kirl
Pretty cool...

I mailed him some time ago about the sailboat animation on his site and that was in fact real-time...!!!! (it had caustics, displacement, refraction, transperency and what not)

Unbelievable no...? :)

:surprised

[JIII]

hmm bramello does that mean it really is unbelieveable?

[MJV]

Originally posted by JIII
hmm bramello does that mean it really is unbelieveable?

I see no reason to find it hard to doubt that he really didn't mean to say it really isn't unbelievable.

[brammelo]

JIII, the :surprised emoticon really means "surprised". I was surprised at the fact that that movie was a realtime output from C4D. This is very important stuff. And I don't think it's unbelievable, although I find it jawdropping.

Cheers,
BaRa

[JIII]

ahh so its not a, hmm I am are sure about that.

its more like a, whoa momma I don't believe my eyes.

[handige_harrie]

Originally posted by handige_harrie

GFX-cards will become REALLY REALLY REALLY interesting when they are going to asist in rendering. They are working on this, and probably in three to five years time hardware and software will support this. I expect this will cut renderimtes about a hundred-fold. If you look at current FX in games that are pumped out at 50-100 frames per second and compare it with minutes to hours that some single frames take when rendering in C4D just on CPU-power. Probably only professional cards are going to support this in the future, and thus be very expensive. But it may well be worth the money.

So I was wrong on two parts:

-It's coming a lot sooner than expected which is a good thing.
-It's not just for professional cards which is an even better thing.


I wonder if instead of doing realtime, hardware rendering can give a better and more realistic output (similar to that of software rendering) in more time (ie. not realtime any more). The way I see it, hardware rendering quality is not up to par with software (cpu) rendering. Or am I wrong?

Anyway it's a great thing :thumbsup:.

[kiwi]

Originally posted by handige_harrie
So I was wrong on two parts:

-It's coming a lot sooner than expected which is a good thing.
-It's not just for professional cards which is an even better thing.


I wonder if instead of doing realtime, hardware rendering can give a better and more realistic output (similar to that of software rendering) in more time (ie. not realtime any more). The way I see it, hardware rendering quality is not up to par with software (cpu) rendering. Or am I wrong?

Anyway it's a great thing :thumbsup:.



:hmm: I think the rendering should be just the same,only hardware can allow you to do more quicker.



So with hardware rendering does this mean the 256m cards are going to come into their own?



Stu.

[kiwi]

Displacement,caustics,transparency as well.....


This just gets better and better :thumbsup:

[Kirl]

here (http://wscg.zcu.cz/wscg2003/Papers_2003/B02.pdf) you can find some more info on the sailboat/water thingy...

[Thalaxis]

Originally posted by kiwi
:hmm: I think the rendering should be just the same,only hardware can allow you to do more quicker.
[quote][b]

We're close, but not quite there yet. Current graphics hardware is
up to 32-bits per channel, max. Most production renderers use
64-bits per channel these days.

Also, the level of sophistication available in the shaders for
graphics processors isn't up to, say, SLA or DarkTree's level of
sophistication.

That's not to say "never!", but rather just to say not quite yet, but
we're getting there... quickly.

[quote][b]
So with hardware rendering does this mean the 256m cards are going to come into their own?


My guess is that they will in another couple of generations,
especially as display technology improves and drops in price,
allowing more and more users to run at higher resolution, and as
polygon counts in games go up, and graphics horsepower
increases. The horsepower will most likely continue to be far in
excess of what available bandwidth can feed, so larger and larger
local buffers will most likely continue to be the norm for quite a
while.

[kiwi]

Cheers :thumbsup:


So the cards with 256m are not really a necessary item at this stage then :)....a 128m Quadro is gonna dear enough at my end,if whoever it is writes the drivers for the G5s........OT}But I really dont undestand why Apple or Nvidia dont just say ya working on drivers,it would benefit both,I cant see any downside to an announcement either.



Stu.

[Thalaxis]

Yes, for the most part the 256 MB frame buffers are, right now,
overkill.

They are overkill in the same way that 64-bit computing is
overkill: right now, the need isn't there... but it's not far off.

Actually, 64-bit computing is a bit less ahead of the curve than
256 MB frame buffers right now, but I seriously doubt that either
one is that far off from being truly useful, even though it will most
likely be at least a decade before either is mainstream.

As for why they don't talk about these things... well, it is to a
large extent a marketing thing. Revealing what you are up to can
be beneficial for your competitors.

I think however that the people making the decisions about what
to reveal (who are very rarely the same people who are doing the
actual work) tend to be rather overzealous about secrecy.

[3dg]

I've always been dissapointed with the "render as editor" setting in Cinema because it will only do software renders. My video card produces much nicer renders in realtime than the software render that I get on disk. Now with this new plugin certain things can actually be rendered real time and used in the final piece!

Can't wait!

Where can we get more info?

Thanks

Gary

[kiwi]

Ya that makes sense Thalaxis :) ,they probably also have a nice lucrative build to order deal with ATI as well.



3dg - Browse back up the page until you get to Kirls post,the word here is linked to a very interesting pdf :)



Stu.

[Katachi]

Originally posted by brammelo
JIII, the :surprised emoticon really means "surprised". I was surprised at the fact that that movie was a realtime output from C4D. This is very important stuff. And I don't think it's unbelievable, although I find it jawdropping.

Cheers,
BaRa

Are you sure it is a realtime output from Cinema 4D and not his own engine?

[brammelo]

Hi Samir,

No I'm not sure about anything in this case. It's all very new, and I'm floatin on "old" knowledge. However, I'm pretty sure you can shed some light on this ;)

Cheers,
BaRa

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