Messiah render speed comparison.

#41

…or an answer to this one first…

Man, I hope you weren’t reading like I wouldn’t care about Photons. Photons are kick as$, only that in case of Gi it takes a lot of careful fine tuning to understand what the best settings are and they are never universal. Each scene may have it’s own sweetspot/numbers.
But my particular interest in Photons starts somewhere else, not directly related to Gi, but intstead for other shading needs! It’s something Fori and I have been thinking about for a long time now, but never had a chance to implement it so far. Hopefully soon we’ll get to do that so I can show you what I mean.

Another thing that actually opera was talking about and that we all have heard over the years is the whole “baking” issue, actually. I would want to go one step farther and actually “abuse” that baking concept right away to improve upon bounces for the light! So in the first pass it would bake down the first illumination, second bounce simply reads the first baked pass…and so forth…no more extra computations. That should speed it up dramatically! We shall see…if too much memory was needed, it could potentially end up actually becoming slower…one never knows.:shrug: Not to mention the mapping for the objects…ehh…well… we would have some internal UV mapping that probably ends up acting kind of like Zbrush’s GUV stuff. Ahm…I think I’m just thinking out loud here… :rolleyes:

Anyway…good stuff here! Thanx a lot!

#42


5:34 shadow reflections are too blotchy.

any ideas why the shadows look good on the ground but no in the reflections?

#43

yea the shadows that are reflected don’t seem to get as much attention with the AA.

Its so cool that your doing this Stooch. I sometimes feel like I’m the only one playing with the renderer. :-/

edit* shadows seem to get their own little post/blur effect applied to them before the real AA kicks in. But that post blur doesn’t happen to the reflections. So the higher quality you set the shadow the less it will look bad in the reflection. (just guessing here though)

#44

did everyone notice that the NO PHOTON render that took over 20 minutes has a much more accurate back wall? its not as dark as the photon version…bug?

#45

I agree with Wegg – It’s pretty cool you’re looking into this. I just recently started playing with the renderer part of the messiah, as I normally focused on the animation portion of it, so your findings so far are pretty interesting and informative as well.

Your latest render appears to be the best looking so far. I too, I’m interested in seeing why the reflected shadows aren’t getting softened as the rest of the shadows are. All your messiah test renders so far have been showing this phenomena. Hopefully there’s an easy solution to this.

Cheers.

#46

thanks! im glad this is useful, otherwise it wouldnt be as rewarding.

im doing all these tests to see how messiah would fit into my pipeline. although my biggest concern is the lack of renderfarm support. IE, we are ordering render mule and i would hate to be forced to use butterfly net render just because of messiah…

has anyone compared rendermule vs butterfly? any thoughts or preference?

also, is there a way to use batch scripts like with LWSN in messiah?

#47

It took a few years but Paul Lord and I finally got Messiah working with Butterfly. I really do think it is a good solution for both Messiah and Lightwave. For a little while there was a render.exe file available that was a command line renderer but it isn’t on their FTP site any more. You may want to ask CHRIS REID about it.

#48

No but you should try to set the shadow quality to 1, and instead add more AA.
I am using the Halton AA at size 1 and get good results!

/ Svante

#49


4:19 not bad for the speed. i cheated though, im using 4 threads…

#50


2:58 @ 4 threads.

You know PMG guys, if you can figure out the noisy reflections and the dark back wall (compared to non photon render) you probably have the fastest GI solution on the market… this is pretty damn fast.

#51

Impressive…! Well done, Stooch! :buttrock:

Come on, pmG… get the ball rollin’.

Cheers.

#52

Okidoki! Sounds like a good idea to me! :wavey:

:beer:

Taron

#53

This is a LW render using Interpolated radiosity with 10x30 sampling, 4 bounces, .3 tolerance, 30mm spacing. I also used 30% motion blur to smooth things a bit.

This render took 5 minutes, however its hard to tell that this even has radiosity, the undersides of the balls are pretty much black and the ceiling is getting very little light. Very little color is being transferred from the walls as well.

#54

Hey Taron !

“The shadow map is a snapshot of the light’s viewport, which is a 2d projection of the light’s clip space. In order to perform the texture projection, we will use OpenGL’s EYE_LINEAR texture coordinate generation, which generates texture coordinates for a vertex based upon its eye-space position.”

Can’t you code a node shader ( Material tree), to blur reflected shadow ?
ie: there is a reflection blur parameter …
can’t we imagine node filter ( 2D filter - Post filter) to smooth the “shadow pass” and composite them for the final render…

In my use of renderman: there are a tips I found

  1. “First pass”
    Render the scene with “Lights” point of view (to generate shadows maps)
    Shadows are saved to a picture file ( for each light).

  2. “Blur the shadows”
    You can set a blur factor to smooth shadows egde ( to have diffuse edge) equivalent of 2D blur.

  3. “composinting during render”
    the “baked” shadows are “remapped” on the scene (similar to a camera projection) on the scene from the camera point of view.

  4. “final render”
    You can finaly render the shadow.

Of course in renderman, I was do it in 2 step (first pass to bake all light shadows to picture file), second pass to render camera view with baked shadow into scene.

You can do it a hidden pass (user friendly ) to do this step including a node to put the strength of blur connected to the light shadow “input”.

I will try to find some tests…

the limitations of the techniques: ( “floor contact” could be too blurred = flying object if the blur is too strenght)

here is a link of a LW plugin doing this "similar method with a “post filter” pass. During the render, the shadow pass is stored in a buffer and blured in post.

here is a link to a LW plugin (please read all the page, very interesting benchmark and technique description):
http://www.evasion3d.com/sd_lw_prodinfo.html

“what you’ll be able to do with Shadow Designer. In this case, several shadow were layers used to add variation into lighting and to emphasize the color bleeding as well.”
"unlimited number of shadow maps
global (per shadow map) and local (per surface) settings
envelopes, interactive help
interactive, realtime preview
automatic shadow map saving option (all lw formats)
color gradients, allowing original shadow and lighting styles
global and local object exclusion lists
"
the gallery to see result
http://www.evasion3d.com/sd_lw_gallery.html

an other tip (or features ;))
you can use this shadow pass to “fake caustics”, by coloring shadows of each object.
http://www.happy-digital.com/images/cowstic/3balls.jpg

technique:
here is a tutorial in a better english to explain the technique :slight_smile:
http://www.animallogic.com/research/mayaman/onlinedocs/tutorials/SoftShadow.html

technical paper in case of:
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/shadow_techniques/
http://www.dotcsw.com/doc/softshadows.html

cheers!

#55

hmm, i didnt see any examples of reflected shadows on that website. although its pretty interesting.

i think pmg are almost there anyway, whatever they are doing to the floor shadow just needs to be applied to the reflected shadow. maybe store the reflected shadows in a buffer and perform the AA on them separatelly.

#56

hey stooch,

don’t be so nervous :slight_smile:

of course you don’t see any reflection shadow exemple…
I did use thoses links (or pictures) to explain “how to do it” by coding …
Nothing you can do if you are not a developer :slight_smile:

Question was: How to make a workaround to have nice softed shadows.( I don’t know how Messiah is coded) but my technique may not work with reflected shadows because the shadow in the sphere : is a mirror of the shadow on the floor.

So if messiah can calculate the shadows, bake it and remap it in the scene (frome the light’s “point of view”… and render the raytracing reflections after the processed map
-> you will be able to see soft reflected shadows.

I need to know how messiah calculate the reflections…(because as you have noticed that the shadows on the floor are soft… and sharp in reflections … ).

I just hope that messiah doesn’t render “twice” the shadow !!! … (of course you need to calculate the boucing rays… but there is an other way to do it than the actual methode…) with my few knowledge of messiah, I just can speculate.(I don’t have “technical” paper of the render engine)

But to give you a picture to illustrate my words : imagine a kind of “reflection blur value” to afect only the shadows (selective on raytraced objects and on the floor in post process) … (of course it’s a picture -you have to imagine … )

cheers!

#57

Baking is a thing that I really miss in Messiah. This sounds like it might come in the future. Do I understand this right Taron? That would kick ass!! :thumbsup:

#58

Stooch, could you post a link to either the original LW scene, or the forum thread where you found it please ?

#59

Backing! Yesssss WHEN? this Year ?

#60

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36461&highlight=kray+box

try page 57.

Opera. Its not that im nervous, its the fact that i dont think your idea will work. I think what is already being used by PMG to smooth the shadows, would be much easier to apply to reflections - without resorting to baking or shadow cheating solutions.