No corona vs redshift comparison so far?

[juang3d]

@lasse1309 - xoio

It's not that hard... if you have a scene with some materials and one render result in a specific time, you can convert this scene to achieve the exact or similar visual aspect, with renderer specific materials, same lighting or as similar as possible and check the time.
The thing is that you have to dedicate that time to configure as much as you can the scene to fiti perfectly with every render you want to compare, and that's time eating :)

The thing is the client is going to see that final result, is what matters, everything in the middle... well the client doesn't care about it.

It's the same with animation, or with every type of project, the final output and the final render time is what matters.

So I can compare oranges vs oranges because even if they were apples and bananas in it's seed form, they are both oranges in their final form, and the client wants oranges, so you can definitely compare render engines and results and times no matter the technology the render uses.

Cheers.

[Juraj]

@lasse1309 - xoio

It's not that hard...

Well, just by using "Well I look and see" aproach you can't really evaluate if you reached the same GI and AA quality for example.

Lasse's example stands quite right. By improving your AA by small amount in Vray for example, you can exponentially multiply your rendertime. And these nuances can be hard to judge and let alone compare by eye.
Therefore any such comparison is doomed to be very far off, almost pointless. How can you even prove you reached similar result without using some overlay software technique ? And that takes into account purely GI and AA,
and those hundreds of little things in how it deals with caustics, dispersion, motion blur...even creating a scene that tests thoroughly and fairly all aspects can be dauntingly challenging.

With underlying algorithms being very different, comparing renderers will almost always be "apples and oranges".

With that said, I LOVE comparisons, but I dislike easy conclusions with "It is faster !", which by most measure, usually aren't very objective and biased proportional to tester's expertise in them.

[juang3d]

I never said you can't overlay results.

What I've said is that you must have a base point to start, a vray render form example, and then work in the scene to match as much as possible teh visual quality and configuration of that scene in corona, for example, now you can keep improving it until you reach the desired quality, including AA or what ever thing you need.

You may not get the "exact" AA, but what you want is a result, and if you increase the render time by increasing AA settings, then increase the AA settings until you reach your desired production AA and quality and use that picture as baseline, then match it in Corona.

I still stand, is not that hard, it's just time, and any comparison is fair, no matter what technology lies behind the render engine, we just need results to our clients, what render can deliver faster results with better quality? That's the question to answer in a comparison test.

Now regarding overlaying results, if what you mean is to check if you can mix render engines to render different layers of the same scene... now that is another story, and there is were you may need an exact comparison of rendered pictures, otherwise... it's time.

What is your client going to see? that is where the difference lies... the internal differences doesn't matter, I don't care if the AA is slightly different as long as I reach my desired quality, and the client eye is going to judge... so the comparison should be made by eye IMHO, not mathematically, the only thing that matters is to know what helps you reach your desired result in less time and with less work.

Of course you can do a more techie test, but that is not for decission making but more for curiosity.

Cheers.

[Juraj]

the render fight should always be speed at the best possible quality the render engine can deliver

I argued why you can't objectively measure speed/quality. You can just subjectively decide when some random quality you decided on matches former result (that you will eyeball based on previous renderer's result)
matches speed you attained based on your skill with particular renderer. It yields absolutely no value to anyone else than yourself then. it varies wildly proportional to your skill with such renderer.

Regarding overlay. no, that's not what meant. I simply put that forward as imaginary example of what would yield to be some analytical tool to measure difference/likeness of results in technical terms.

Regarding end-result for client, that's absolutely different matter. Almost all renderers can give you identical result if you try.

I think what you want to compare is how much effort in terms of human resources and time spent is required for each renderer to get likeable/desired result. But that can't be used for objective 'comparison' between renderers ("abc" vs "xyz" ) but instead
only as personal view on particular renderer (i.e "I like Corona because...abc"). If it's falsely used as the former, it only and always (in 100perc. of cases) leads to wildly biased fanboy fights on behalf of their amateur skills.

[Ondra]

http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/aboutFurryBall/compare.html

nuff said.

[Juraj]

“To put it into perspective, when Pixar was developing the movie ‘Cars 2,’ its average rendering time per frame was 11.5 hours,” says Bassett. “We’re rendering at seven seconds a frame using Octane. It changes everything. There are now Hollywood movies being made using this technology.”

http://www.bdcnetwork.com/hyper-speed-rendering-how-gensler-turns-bim-models-beauty-shots-seconds?eid=216311880&bid=881711

You can think Corona is fast, but it will never be fast as Octane in Gensler office. They're 600 times faster than Pixar.

Jeez marketing these days is just...

[racoonart]

You can think Corona is fast, but it will never be fast as Octane in Gensler office. They're 600 times faster than Pixar.

It's exactly THIS bullshit which makes clients think we're just trying to rip them off when we charge render farm time.

[juang3d]

Maybe we are thinking in compare tests in a different way and with a different objective in mind... I do them and I like them to decide what is going to be my production render engine, where to spend my money if I have to, I need to compare, and the thing is that I need to compare for the end result I'm going to get, is not about this render is better than this other, the Furryball is a great example of a biased comparison, for a start you can take tht test just for interior viz, and one not too complex, and for the end, they didn't even tried to get the same result and with the best time with every render, this is a biased test used commercially to convince people that Furryball is better, IMHO this test is easily beatable, in fact here is where eyeball comparison can tell you something is wrong with this test, different refraction bounces, different noise level, different AA, those times and render results are completely random.

But if a good test is done, like some tests that are out there comparing vray with mental ray, they can help decide you if that render engine is good for your project or not.

Now this is a completely subjective matter, I mean, I can get my conclussion, I can think Corona is better than vRay based on my experience, I can think Corona is better than iRay based on my tests and feature set, but is subjective, but a good comparison is always to be subjective, so you can try to do the best test you can, being as fair as you can with each compared render engine, and maybe you will get some helpful results for your type of job.

Now, what I'm not trying to say is that a comparison will tell us wich render is the best render, what I'm trying to say is that it's completely valid to compare vray with it's biased methods against Corona completely unbiased if you want, because the idea is what you've said in the quoted phrase:

Regarding end-result for client, that's absolutely different matter. Almost all renderers can give you identical result if you try.

"Almost all renderers can give you identical result if you try." YES, but in what time? that's the test I meant :)

Cheers.

EDIT: "“To put it into perspective, when Pixar was developing the movie ‘Cars 2,’ its average rendering time per frame was 11.5 hours,” says Bassett. “We’re rendering at seven seconds a frame using Octane. It changes everything. There are now Hollywood movies being made using this technology.” " this is marketing crap, it's a non-sense :P

[Juraj]

Sorry, I meant 6000 times :- D My math sucks. Damn, they are fast like hell. We all must do something very wrong...


Juang3d: It got big confusing now :- ) But I agree on tests being helpful, just not decideful on renderer's capacity. But of course, I love to see them anyway.

[juang3d]

I love to see them anyway.

Let me add... agree :D

[Captain Obvious]

http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/aboutFurryBall/compare.html

nuff said.

Ugh, don't get me started on Furryball. I emailed them my MODO version of that classroom, you know. Vastly better quality than any of the images on their comparison page, and it took less than five minutes on a run-of-the-mill i7. Ten minutes on my quad-core laptop. They didn't want to post it, though, because "only Maya plugins" -- despite the fact that MODO is available as a plugin for Maya via moma. If they can include Maxwell, which is also an export-to-standalone-based plugin, surely the same setup for MODO is also valid. Bah!



Anyway, back to Redshift... They're releasing a 3ds Max plugin eventually and when they do I'll post some tests here.



edit: also, all this talk about performance is mostly irrelevant. What matters is what you need, how you prefer to work, and how slow you're willing to accept. That's why there's room in the marketplace for both Arnold and Unreal Engine. Arnold is pretty goddamned slow, but it handles pretty much anything you throw at it. It will, as far as I've heard, basically never fail to produce good results. It just takes a very long time to do so. So if reliability even with complex scenes and high quality is your top priorities and you're willing to pay a lot of money for rendering, then it's a valid choice. But if you need stuff in actual real-time, you're obviously better off with Unreal Engine, even though it means compromising on flexibility, quality, reliability, etc.

Corona is not the fastest engine around. It really isn't. Many engines, even mental ray, and definitely V-Ray, can be tweaked to produce good results in less render time than Corona would typically take. But the main advantage of Corona is that it gives you quality that competes with the best of what unbiased rendering has to offer, with a feature set that you typically only get in classical biased rendering, performance that isn't too far behind (and sometimes ahead), and a workflow that is better than either. That's a pretty cool thing. Don't get lost in the whole "rendertime" issue.

[Ludvik Koutny]

Many engines, even mental ray, and definitely V-Ray, can be tweaked to produce good results in less render time than Corona would typically take. But the main advantage of Corona is that it gives you quality that competes with the best of what unbiased rendering has to offer, with a feature set that you typically only get in classical biased rendering, performance that isn't too far behind (and sometimes ahead), and a workflow that is better than either. That's a pretty cool thing. Don't get lost in the whole "rendertime" issue.

Vray yes, but mental ray no. No matter how you tweak mental ray, it will always provide either vastly inferior, or extremely long rendering results.

[boumay]

edit: also, all this talk about performance is mostly irrelevant. ...

...
Corona is not the fastest engine around. It really isn't. Many engines, even mental ray, and definitely V-Ray, can be tweaked to produce good results in less render time than Corona would typically take.

But why people would have been seduced by corona or redshift, if vray or mr were as fast if you tweak their paramaters a little bit, if it wasnt' that they saw there was, not only a difference, but a huge increase of speed in common scenarios they were facing in every day life?

[Captain Obvious]

Many engines, even mental ray, and definitely V-Ray, can be tweaked to produce good results in less render time than Corona would typically take. But the main advantage of Corona is that it gives you quality that competes with the best of what unbiased rendering has to offer, with a feature set that you typically only get in classical biased rendering, performance that isn't too far behind (and sometimes ahead), and a workflow that is better than either. That's a pretty cool thing. Don't get lost in the whole "rendertime" issue.

Vray yes, but mental ray no. No matter how you tweak mental ray, it will always provide either vastly inferior, or extremely long rendering results.

Notice that I didn't say mental ray could produce as good results in less time, merely that it could produce good results -- good in this case meaning good enough. That was kind of my point. Corona is great if you need really great quality. If you only need decent quality, it might not be the best choice.

[boumay]

Notice that I didn't say mental ray could produce as good results in less time, merely that it could produce good results -- good in this case meaning good enough. That was kind of my point. Corona is great if you need really great quality. If you only need decent quality, it might not be the best choice.

Ok, I see. Makes sense.