v 14 Daily Builds

[Börje]

I'm just curious as on the Trello-Roadmap the release date for version 14 is set to November: are we expecting any Daily Builds of version 14 in the coming weeks?

[johnnyswedish]

My guess they are on a well deserved summer holiday :-)

[TomG]

Partially true for sure - different people are taking vacation at different times, so the effect does get spread out :) We're also collecting bugs and maybe one or two other things that need to be done in a hotfix for 13 before releasing that as the first daily, once we've collected enough changes and made sure we haven't missed out anything that needs to go in there. Shouldn't be too long before we see the first dailies though - but as noted, those will be focused on hotfix content for 13 at the moment, rather than focused on new content for 14.

[frv]

I See Gaussian Splat render on the road map. Is Coronarender going GPU ?

[TomG]

No - nothing about rendering Gaussian Splats needs to be GPU, and in fact V-Ray CPU was the first of our products (if not the first render engine) to be able to render them :)

[frv]

Thanks Tom. So Gaussian splats render faster on CPU's as well. But its actually really effective on GPU's as far as I understand.
Any idea when this would be implemented ?

[TomG]

I personally wouldn't view Splats as offering faster rendering - rather they offer far smaller data sizes and better quality than the good ol' point clouds that were the only way to do this kind of thing before, and that's where their benefit lies. I have no idea whether they are faster than point clouds, never looked into it as I don't see that as being what their strength is :) They may also be easier to generate than point clouds, needing less data to get to good results, haven't dug into that since generating the splat from photo / video data is not part of what we are implementing here.

As to when, the answer is Corona 14 :) Which is set for November. It will be out in dailies before then, but dailies are not production-ready, so depends on what you mean by "implemented". If you just mean "when you can try it out", that will be in some daily sometime, but we don't set dates or estimates for dailies and when something will appear in one. All I can tell you is it is already mostly working in internal builds, for Max at least.

[frv]

Thanks Tom,
so maybe for Corona's end-users it won't make much of a difference.

Hopefully the amount of Ram used gets less and interactive rendering better. I am working on a Mac and what's makes it so expensive is the 128Gb ram and what Apple charges for it.

[TomG]

Well, the foreseen use case for Corona users is to create actual 3D environments that can surround a scene, vs. just 360 flat images or very heavy point clouds. The benefit of the smaller file size / lighter "weight" to the data is that it remains very responsive in the viewport while working with the scene compared to point clouds - effectively that's the faster speed you are thinking of :) After all splat file sizes can be so small that they can be streamed over the web for a web browser viewer.

Small data sizes also means less running out of memory, which is always a Very Good Thing :)

You can check out the start of this video which covers what splats are good for:

t=2s

[frv]

Thanks Tom, very interesting.