Juraj's Renderings thread

[daniel.reutersward]

5 hours/5k/Dual Xeon (3x performance)= 15 hours/5k/i7= 4 hours/2.5k/i7 :- ) It's the same times.

Scenes are decently fast in one of two scenarios happen:

     Simple scene (Gi), but enough complicated materials (specular)= Icelandic house, very fast.
     Complicated scene (Gi), but few materials only (specular) = Parisian apartment, decently fast as well.

But if I have scene that has it both, like intricated long rooms, lot of GI details (Stucco), but also every material is glossy specular, it's big issue. It's like the render times suddenly multiply. It's not slower...but I need 4times more passes on same settings than usual.
It's not really Corona issue only, Vray struggles as well, as in these scenarios, IR cannot be used, it will never pick-up the stucco details correctly (just ask Bertrand Benoit how many times he tried).

I missunderstood because I estimated 1/2 of the time for half the render size :)

I see what you mean. I remember when I used Vray how hard it was sometimes to get details with IR so I switched to BF, love the quality with BF/PT!

[Juraj]

No, my issue isn't with visual fidelity/detail in IR, IR can bring out similar detail as BF simply if you rise its resolution (Max. level=0= Same resolution as framebuffer), esp. coupled with 'detail enhancement' (local Brute force single bounce).
But even at best IR thresholds for quality (the adjustments no one touches because they are potato and one one know how they work, Normal, Color and Distance), it will simply fail to allocate samples properly at intricate geometry far-off camera.
Leading to infamous Blotches. By the time you're so/so able to tweak the IR map to roughly get this area correct, you are at times rivaling Brute Force, so you might as well just use brute force straight away in such case.

This is big dilemma that I don't have to deal with in Corona. But there are times were IR is simply invaluable, for example interior animations. I can't imagine path-tracing these...not yet.

[daniel.reutersward]

No, my issue isn't with visual fidelity/detail in IR, IR can bring out similar detail as BF simply if you rise its resolution (Max. level=0= Same resolution as framebuffer), esp. coupled with 'detail enhancement' (local Brute force single bounce).
But even at best IR thresholds for quality (the adjustments no one touches because they are potato and one one know how they work, Normal, Color and Distance), it will simply fail to allocate samples properly at intricate geometry far-off camera.
Leading to infamous Blotches. By the time you're so/so able to tweak the IR map to roughly get this area correct, you are at times rivaling Brute Force, so you might as well just use brute force straight away in such case.

This is big dilemma that I don't have to deal with in Corona. But there are times were IR is simply invaluable, for example interior animations. I can't imagine path-tracing these...not yet.

I understand what you mean :) Those blotches made me crazy... Is it because using PT would take too long? Or any other reason?

[racoonart]

This is big dilemma that I don't have to deal with in Corona. But there are times were IR is simply invaluable, for example interior animations. I can't imagine path-tracing these...not yet.

Depends. My cathedral for example was the reason why I decided to go with Corona in the first place. IR simply fails in such a difficult light situation (hundreds of small openings and detailed geometry). It took ages and still looked shitty. So sometimes (especially if something moves) pt can be the solution, even with interiors. It still takes a painful amount of time though :D

[Juraj]

IR can compute the GI part in fraction of time and reuse it for multiple frames. That's two domains where it saves the time.

Example: 1 Frame (BF/LC or PT/UHD, doesn't matter) = 2 min for UHD + 2 hours for fullHD clean interior
                1 Frame (IR/LC) = 2 minutes for LC, 10 minutes for detailed IR, and and 20 minutes for frame.

So for still image, we get roughly 4 times faster image at best, at worst it can be roughly twice only. It's almost always faster, because since interpolated GI is always smooth (IR cannot be noisy), there is much less noise to deal with after. Specular surfaces render much faster.

But the true time savings come to simple flythrough animation, where single IR map, can be reused across multiple frames, at slow speeds, even 1 IR map per 30 frames.

So 1 minute of animation (BF/LC or PT/UHD) is 1800 (frames) x 2 hours = 3600 render hours
     1 minute of animation (IR+ LC) =  180 (every 10nth frame to be safe for every static scenario)x10min + 1800x20 = 630 render hours

The time saving are even better. The whole setup is more complicate, and issue-prone,...but ultimately, we are talking thousands of euros in computation times difference.

[Juraj]

This is big dilemma that I don't have to deal with in Corona. But there are times were IR is simply invaluable, for example interior animations. I can't imagine path-tracing these...not yet.

Depends. My cathedral for example was the reason why I decided to go with Corona in the first place. IR simply fails in such a difficult light situation (hundreds of small openings and detailed geometry). It took ages and still looked shitty. So sometimes (especially if something moves) pt can be the solution, even with interiors. It still takes a painful amount of time though :D

Yes, that's why I mentioned the Stucco interiors, where it fails as well, and takes equal time just to look much worse :- ).

By the time you're so/so able to tweak the IR map to roughly get this area correct, you are at times rivaling Brute Force, so you might as well just use brute force straight away in such case.

But most archviz guys aren't rendering flythrough of cathedrals :- )

I am not saying IR is superior, it's extremely shitty, faulty, moody, potato settings hard to tweak algorithm. But when it works, it's invaluable speed-up.
And when I have animation, where the difference between using IR and BF is 10 thousands euros, I compromise every minute to make it work.

[daniel.reutersward]

Thanks for the detailed info! You really save time with IR, but it would be interesting to render an animation in Corona :) I will however be prepared for loooong render times..

Have I misunderstood something but isn´t UHD Cache suppose to help with animations?

[Juraj]

Thanks for the detailed info! You really save time with IR, but it would be interesting to render an animation in Corona :) I will however be prepared for loooong render times..

Have I misunderstood something but isn´t UHD Cache suppose to help with animations?

It helps to avoid flickering. But it's still just one part of GI. Pathtracing still contributes to it on each frame. While with IR+LC, GI is completely pre-computed and reused across multiple frames (obviously there are tons of drawbacks, esp. with non-static geometry, but for archviz, it works most of the time).

UHD is just new HD Cache that will work for both stills and animation. It's nothing animation specific, neither does it speed it up or anything.

[daniel.reutersward]

It helps to avoid flickering. But it's still just one part of GI. Pathtracing still contributes to it on each frame. While with IR+LC, GI is completely pre-computed and reused across multiple frames (obviously there are tons of drawbacks, esp. with non-static geometry, but for archviz, it works most of the time).

UHD is just new HD Cache that will work for both stills and animation. It's nothing animation specific, neither does it speed it up or anything.

Now that you mention it I remember reading that UHD Cache would help with flickering :)

[Sekhar_R]

With little time, we had to create Bonaldo Tufty-time sofa in cloth finish. It's kind of hard, even for Marvelous, but I am quite happy with result like this. Courtesy to Veronika

Already playing with Alpha5. Funny my scene didn't render correctly, so I opted for merging into new scene, and than it rendered correctly again. Filtering Yes or No still cause me some confusion, so at the moment, all maps are unfiltered at 0.1 except for bump which is filtered at 0.1 on summed area.

I guess also bidirectional isn't suitable for this type of scene ? It seems impressively noisy compared to simple path tracing, so I guess it benefits only for much complicated lightning ? Little light sources and caustics,etc.



Still incredibly happy for this renderer.

EDIT:

Final version :

Hi Juraj,

I have been following this feed for quite some time now and got aboard the Corona Ship. Admiring your work. would you mind, sharing your floor material workflow? is that a texture, or elements using railclone or something of that sort. How to apply random texture, if it was made in Railclone. (the material element is not fully supported in Railclone). A quick response with some details is highly appreciated, as I am trying hard to replicate the effect.

Thanks a lot for your time on reading this post. Cheers.

[Juraj]

I am not using Railclone, I don't even own it :- ) I hope someone from my team wishes to learn it (Veronika shown some interest), but I have none.

The floor was modelled manually, but that really is simple process, you just copy all the planks, and then do some manual offseting and rotating in fractions so you have some random detail.
This was rendered with Alpha 5, so I also had to bake out the map from multitexture which I rendered top-down in Scanline, but today you can use multitexture directly...so that's very easy.

It has two UV mappings. One is per each element, and one is big planar tiled with scratches.

So funny how old that is....and how good Alpha 5 worked for archviz already.

[Sekhar_R]

I am not using Railclone, I don't even own it :- ) I hope someone from my team wishes to learn it (Veronika shown some interest), but I have none.

The floor was modelled manually, but that really is simple process, you just copy all the planks, and then do some manual offseting and rotating in fractions so you have some random detail.
This was rendered with Alpha 5, so I also had to bake out the map from multitexture which I rendered top-down in Scanline, but today you can use multitexture directly...so that's very easy.

It has two UV mappings. One is per each element, and one is big planar tiled with scratches.

So funny how old that is....and how good Alpha 5 worked for archviz already.

Thanks for the response Juraj. I did start on the same path of yours, using the CLONE script from itoo. Its really handy and free. Will upload a test render soon. Keep up the good work. regards

[kehlje]

Hey Juraj, what is the process you've alluded to for using different UVW channels to map, for instance, wood textures to individual planks as well as an overarching dirt texture? I've tried searching for this online but I keep getting results that are more about texturing complex objects, creatures, etc., for other types of viz work. Thanks in advance!

[Juraj]

Hey Juraj, what is the process you've alluded to for using different UVW channels to map, for instance, wood textures to individual planks as well as an overarching dirt texture? I've tried searching for this online but I keep getting results that are more about texturing complex objects, creatures, etc., for other types of viz work. Thanks in advance!

wood textures to individual planks as well as an overarching dirt texture

Just that. Each plank has UV map encompassing only that plank, additionally, there is one big map tiling over 30 or so planks. For each UV, you use another channel (1,2,3...), and don't forget to do the same in bitmaps in mat editor.

You can use as many UV maps as you wish.

[kehlje]

I see now -- thanks! Going to test it out...