Refraction Mapping

#21

Yeah, that’s what it seems when looking at your renders.
Most of the “biased” renderers seems to render caustics like vague spots on surfaces, without detail. :sad:
But EI has always crisp caustics, well detailed, and although they probably aren’t that realistic, they look great ! :thumbsup:
And it doesn’t hurt to know they render fast ! :wink:

Yes, i know, i’m a little bit “focused” on that aspect ! :blush:
But it’s because i’m actually using a 8cores MacPro, and i can see the waist of power combined with the single-threaded Camera as it is now… :cry:

That, plus the non-raytraced DoF are show-stopper for me now, but i’m more than ever keeping an eye on EI, as it seems to “resuscitate” ! :cool:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#22

Yes, while I’ve made my peace with V7 not being multi-threaded I sure would love to see it implemented.

I mentioned a few weeks ago - bought a cheaper PC with a quad processor and installed Modo there too. Was 4.5 times faster than my 2.3 Dual which is only 2 years old! So in my case that would probably have been a 7-8 times render boost if EI was multi-threaded.

I’ve never used much DOF in my work and have always found it too slow - what benifits does a ray-traced DOF have over something like the new one V7 has now implemented? Brazil 1.2 was very slow with DoF while Vray was quite snappy in comparison. Brazil 2 is much, much faster and now with the quad, I might play with it a little.

#23

Yeah, raytraced DoF is slooooowwww but it becomes cheaper with highend machines, and in some scenes, you just can’t use a “layered composite hack” to do it… :sad:

Here is an example render i did in a free java renderer called Sunflow (great renderer by the way ! :thumbsup: ) which shows what kind of effect are impossible to reach without raytraced DoF :

EIAS isn’t the only one to suffer from the lack of real raytraced DoF as C4D, even with Advanced Render doesn’t have the feature either.

2D post-effect DoF is great and fast in many situation, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the choice to render a more realistic one ! :drool:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#24

I’ve never used DOF in EIAS and prefer to do it in post, these guys have some great DOF plugins - http://www.frischluft.com

I use lensecare in PS and its great and fast - http://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/lenscare.php

there is a comparison on Brazil DOF, Brazil: 190 minutes vs. Lenscares dof: 6 seconds + 4min no dof Brazil render.

I agree with the comments regarding multi-threading, as i’ve mentioned before, the more that muilti-core CPU’s evolve and become “the norm”, the slower EI camera will “appear” to be, it a pitty EI has not been on the ball because it was clear some time ago that this hardware trend was not going away.

#25

Howdy, just a couple of comments about DoF and Multi-threading.

The best DoF I have ever seen (and the fastest by far) has and is done in post-production. For example, I used lens care in AE recently to do DoF effects in an animation, it took a few seconds a frame to calculate (with bokeh effects) compared to several minutes per frame that doing it in 3D requires (without bokeh).

I know it’s not an ideal solution but I actually have no real issue sending all my renders out by renderama, it means I can use all 2/4 or 8 cores on my machines, or use only a couple so I can keep working at the same time etc etc. Multi-threading will be added to Camera at some point, same goes for 64bit, but lets be aware it is also imperfect, for example, the most efficient multi-threading on the planet would have 0% speed boost for intensive shader tasks (such as the Scratches shader) - that isn’t the case for strip rendering where these tasks can be 2/4/8 times faster. But like I said, I’m sure it will happen in the future as it is simply more intuitive.

All features except glow sets work perfectly with strip rendering.

:slight_smile:
Ian

#26

Much nicer than the first one and closer to the Brazil version, you can see how the slightly different model is affecting reflection/refreaction, i still prefer your Brazil renders but the night is young :wink:

#27

As i said, i know that 2D post-effect DoF is great and fast -even realtime tweakable, that’s nice :drool:- but give me an example of 2D post-effect for a render like the one i posted above that is convincing enough and i’ll stop asking for it ! :wink:

Like i said, choice is always better than a single way to do things… :cool:
But, you said it, Lenscare is one helle of a cool Photoshop or AfterFX plugin, and we can add DoFPro for Windows Ps users (unfortunately not on MacOS X… :sad: )

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

Edit : Thanks Ian for the tip about Renderama, that’s what i was thinking to get max performance out of Camera.
Is Renderama difficult to setup or is it fast ? i.e. when you want to render on all core how long does it take to setup ?

#28

Hi Laurent,

I totally agree with you, there is simply no other way to do that kind of render. But, that said, it isn’t true DoF (a camera would not look like that, it would have Bokeh effects).

No way is perfect. But yes, you are correct :slight_smile:

It takes about 20 minutes to set up Rama for multi-processor rendering the first time you do it (you have to create ‘slave’ folders for each processor), and from then on it only takes 10 seconds per project (tick a box and type in how many processors you have).

It works well, but isn’t as intuitive as other 3D apps.

Best,
Ian

#29

Ok, thanks for the reply ! :slight_smile:

Can you use Renderama for your tests render or is it only a “final render” solution ?

Oh, and by the way, Sunflow has True Camera DoF, with Bokeh effects ! :wink:
It’s just that on this render you can’t see them as there isn’t any real bright spot, but i have some renders (i wont post them here 'cos they are 2560x1600 renders…) that show the Bokeh effect. :drool:

You can see some of them if you follow the link i gave in the post with the picture. :thumbsup:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#30

renderama is fast if render in movie, with 2 core render speed almost 200% faster,
but when render in Hi resolution still with 2/4 strip, i notice the speed only increase 20% to 30%… I want multi-threading!

#31

Hi Laurent, my bad, then that sunflower is very impressive :slight_smile:
You can use rama for preview renders (you just need to send them via ‘go’ instead of snapshots).

Loon, do you have your slaves on separate hard drives? Our renders can literally be 500% faster on our 8 core machine…

Ian

#32

No problemo ! :slight_smile:
In fact there was no way to know by only looking at my poor picture that Sunflow could render Bokeh effects ! :wink:

As for Renderama, that’s great to know ! :drool:
So let’s say a real raytraced DoF then, and you can count me in ! :thumbsup:

And sorry Paul for hijacking your thread. :blush:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#33

Hi Ian, I only have 1 hard drive, 2 core machine, maybe that is the reason, I don have the full renderama speed.

But if I have a 16 core machine in the future, do I need 16 hardrive to take the full renderama advantage? it does sounds ridiculous isn’t it? hope Camera will have true multithreading support before 16 core machine come out… :slight_smile:

another query to future camera beside multi-threading, will it use the GPU processor to speed up renderer?

#34

double post, please delete!

#35

tripple post! please delete!
something wrong to the system!???

#36

oh no! please delete this… sorry!!!

#37

does renderama in v7 work with leopard?

#38

Paul, unless I missed it elsewhere in this thread, could you drop a screenshot of the location of this new feature? Looks like one of those brilliant things EI just sticks in a menu, even though it should be surrounded by blinking marquee lights.

Feature request for version 8: in the menus, surround all new features with blinking marquee lights. Toggleable, of course.

#39

It’s in the list of new stuff.

Here you go:

http://homepage.mac.com/sherstobitoff/.Pictures/EI%20V7/SkyMap.jpg

It called a Skymap in the world under the raytrace tab. Fabulous new feature to have. I’d prefer it to alsop have a slot on an individual material basis but a global one works fine for just about everything.

#40

Looks like a great new feature. Can you give a laymen’s exlpanation to what its doing? I can’t quite get the concept of how an global refraction map would apply itself locally to an object, though I can kind of see what the results look like.