I have no idea how optimized or un-optimiszed Vray is for Mac right now as It's not feature complete in Cinema yet.
Heres my 3rd vray attempt took 3 minutes!
Don't ask me what happened to the colors, pilot error is highly possible.
Reason it took 3 minutes was I swapped out the White Sphere for an area light. Which makes it substantially faster.
Ok heres my second vray render attempt, took an Hour just the same oddly
Vray 1hr
Vray 2hr It's a bit smoother, more noticeable in the full size image than this small version
I get the feeling if I rendered for the same 4 hours of the maxwell render it would be very close to the same accuracy and would have 0 noise
(you can't see the noise in the maxwell one as It's zoomed out) But at the same time id take noise over glitchy dented looking GI any day.
Maxwell 4hr
Now to compare this to another renderer, Cinemas:
Cinema 4hr 25min, I think I had it setup a bit wrong, but even so... what a load of shit.
Someone elses comparison of Vray to Maxwell:
5 hours versus 16 hours
And the yellow light in the Vray render is due to the color mapping type, Maxwell employs a burnout effect in post which I'm sure you could do with vray/photoshop on a 32bit image.
So to summarize, Vray is awesome
Vray will let you render all the GI and save it as a file, then reuse it, meaning you can re-render with different Depth of Field, different exposure and there's even an option so you could render an animation if only the camera moves from 1 GI calculation. This means you can re-render using the same GI at any resolution so render small, then re-render at print size and it will only take 2 minutes. Maxwell gets exponentially slower the bigger you render.
-- update -- ok turns out I misunderstood the vray GI, you can't just render the GI once and use it in whole animation. It will only calculate the GI it knows you are going to see by looking ahead at places the camera goes to. And you can't use this method with Irradiance you can only use it with light cache mode which is very very slow and hard to use in my opinion. Making it somewhat useless really. But if your camera doesn't move you'll be fine.
It says light cache mode is better, which I guess it produces nice more maxwell like results but it seems so much slower and harder to setup/tell what the final will look like till the last moment.
Maxwell is better in that you can change individual light strengths after rendering and you can render for as long as you like, if your vray render looks shit after 4hours you have to start again. Maxwell can always resume and refine.
so vray = best for animation and large stills
maxwell = best for small stills
cinemas default renderer = uhm... useless, maybe best for basic motiongraphics where no GI is used.
Heres my 3rd vray attempt took 3 minutes!
Don't ask me what happened to the colors, pilot error is highly possible.
Reason it took 3 minutes was I swapped out the White Sphere for an area light. Which makes it substantially faster.
Ok heres my second vray render attempt, took an Hour just the same oddly
Vray 1hr
Vray 2hr It's a bit smoother, more noticeable in the full size image than this small version
I get the feeling if I rendered for the same 4 hours of the maxwell render it would be very close to the same accuracy and would have 0 noise
(you can't see the noise in the maxwell one as It's zoomed out) But at the same time id take noise over glitchy dented looking GI any day.
Maxwell 4hr
Now to compare this to another renderer, Cinemas:
Cinema 4hr 25min, I think I had it setup a bit wrong, but even so... what a load of shit.
Someone elses comparison of Vray to Maxwell:
5 hours versus 16 hours
Link: www.treddi.com
And the yellow light in the Vray render is due to the color mapping type, Maxwell employs a burnout effect in post which I'm sure you could do with vray/photoshop on a 32bit image.
So to summarize, Vray is awesome
Vray will let you render all the GI and save it as a file, then reuse it, meaning you can re-render with different Depth of Field, different exposure and there's even an option so you could render an animation if only the camera moves from 1 GI calculation. This means you can re-render using the same GI at any resolution so render small, then re-render at print size and it will only take 2 minutes. Maxwell gets exponentially slower the bigger you render.
-- update -- ok turns out I misunderstood the vray GI, you can't just render the GI once and use it in whole animation. It will only calculate the GI it knows you are going to see by looking ahead at places the camera goes to. And you can't use this method with Irradiance you can only use it with light cache mode which is very very slow and hard to use in my opinion. Making it somewhat useless really. But if your camera doesn't move you'll be fine.
It says light cache mode is better, which I guess it produces nice more maxwell like results but it seems so much slower and harder to setup/tell what the final will look like till the last moment.
Maxwell is better in that you can change individual light strengths after rendering and you can render for as long as you like, if your vray render looks shit after 4hours you have to start again. Maxwell can always resume and refine.
so vray = best for animation and large stills
maxwell = best for small stills
cinemas default renderer = uhm... useless, maybe best for basic motiongraphics where no GI is used.
Here I will be collecting information on Particle and Volumetric rendering, for other advanced type of rendering I have another post to track that, here I will specialize in the volumetric end.
-- Examples --
Realworld example, This looks like what I've been trying to create with particles, someone beat me to it with real glass!
Link: www.flickr.com --- set-72057594061844447
I've done a bunch of work on volumetric/particle rendering.
Link: helios.mine.nu --- Painting with Light
-- Tools --
Link: www.indigorenderer.com
PC only, FREE, similar to Maxwell in It's goals.. It's also slow
Volumetric/SSS
Here It's rendering what appears like volumetric effect using SSS, which is an interesting idea as they are essentially the same thing when your computing it accurately:
Vray and Vray4C4D
Link: www.chaosgroup.com
Link: www.vrayforc4d.com
Vray is brilliant and my rendering engine of choice right now, but It can't yet do accurate dispersion, aberration or volumetrics
I think It's DOF and motion blur are fairly accurate (some things missing for C4D right now), and it can simulate bokeh
Volumetric rendering isn't added yet, but It's coming eventually if these examples are anything to go by:
Link: www.trapcode.com
Fast/realtime particle gizmo for AfterEffects
I knocked up the above image in a few minutes playing with it, very nice, but I have a feeling it will produce images that were obviously done using the plugin, you'll soon have a trapcode form look.
Link: www.sidefx.com
Highly regarded program for all kinds of effects, full fledged software suite for Mac and PC
Link: usa.autodesk.com
Maya fluids, a quick test of mine, It's a 2D slice but it can (if your patient) to full volumetric 3D fluids too:
Link: www.cantarcan.com
Voxel engine for Lightwave, Windows only right now but he says a mac version is coming.
Overburn
Some effects guy who has made a setup for Maya to render particle effects using Maya fluids / voxel dealy
Link: petershipkov.com
Krakatoa : Optimized Particle renderer for 3DS Max
Link: www.franticfilms.com --- work_in_progress_gallery
Lightwave has a built in voxel renderer or some sort called hypervoxels. Though finding any information or examples on it isn't as easy as it should be.
Been waiting for this, Trapcode Form plugin for AfterEffects
I knocked up the above image in a few minutes playing with it, very nice, but I have a feeling it will produce images that were obviously done using the plugin, you'll soon have a trapcode form look.
And some more of my quick tests:
Very fire like.. yet not fire
Just wondering if I can achieve similar things within Cinema 4D, which would then have much more power, but be slower to render
Done with Trapcode Form
The following are all from Cinema4D:
The same principles apply for the accumulation of HUE, shifting from red thru orange to yellow depending on the density
A bit coarse. Done with lots of transparent cubes. Deformed by a noise shader.
Same as above but further deformed by a spherical deformer.
Problem is, that seems to be the hard coded maximum number of objects you can clone.... shit!
Max matrix size is 50,000...... lame! I need millions!
So uhm.. that essentially makes it useless
I tried using plane to place objects on and sure enough I can place more than 50,000 clones but it crashed
:-P
also that's then limited to only polygonal objects and cannot generate thinking particles (for no good reason)
So some kind of internal problem going on there, 50,000 polygons easy peasy, 50,000 1 polygon objects.... forget it
Had an epiphany! use visiible lights instead should be super fast...
You can make a light emit no light and cast no shadow, yet still be made visible. Which basically just draws a circular gradient around each light:
Loooks ace, sadly took 13 minutes to render :-S so much for being fast, I guess It's calculating it volumetrically
which seems very expensive way of basically putting a gradient round a light.
So the only way I can go above 50,000 involves using lights and they happen to be by far the slowest method,
which is not better if the render never actually finishes.
I've tried using Hair on splines, but you can't effect the color via mograph effectors.. why not maxon!?
I've tried cellrendering/sketch and toon
Less lights = 33 seconds
2 Minutes 24
18 Minutes
2 Minutes! that's faster!
2 Minutes
1 Minute using
cluster.. not bad
:-D
Sadly this method doesn't seem to work with deformers because it uses thinking particles
and there no way to change the color with a mograph effector... why not Maxon!!
download my example file from:
Link: helios.mine.nu --- PryoFrax.zip
This uses pyrocluster so It's nice and fast and smooth.
25 Minute Render, no idea WHY it took that long and after all that it was incorrect, It's not meant to be stripey
So frustrating, this could be such a powerful technique if it wasn't so slow.
You could use this for all sorts, generating volumetric trails from moving objects for example.
The future is volumetric baby! voxels rule! polygons suck! sub-poly-displacement can only take you so far.
36 Minutes 90,000 particles rendered with pyrocluster
I wrote my own Xpresso in order to get past the 50,000 limit of mographs matrix object.
Trying to render this many items using visible lights well... It's painfull, it just runs out of RAM almost immediately. And I\'m not short on RAM either.
8 Minutes 44,000 Particles, fairly uninteresting result. *thinks*
Finished the Flowery dealy
Needs to be viewed at high brightness
I've unknowingly cropped about an inch all the way round by mistake, oops, ah well it looks good for it, just wondering how I could have done it without knowing
Needs to be viewed at high brightness
I've unknowingly cropped about an inch all the way round by mistake, oops, ah well it looks good for it, just wondering how I could have done it without knowing
:-P
Spent all yesterday crashing, reaching some kind of limit in VRay, maybe even the 4gb RAM limit of 32bit address space, but who knows.
