Arnold pic of the day?

[Francois Lord]

So Andreas, where's our Arnold image for today? :-)

[Andreas Bystrom]

Hows this:
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_strands.jpg

just having some fun with strands :)

[Kris Rivel]

Ok now you are being just plane rude :-)  Seriously though...any idea as to price and availability?  How do you get on beta for this?  If the price is good and the product lives up to all this hype, I'd gladly drop MR like a bad habit.

Kris

[Andreas Bystrom]

Hey

I can't speak about the pricing, same with the availability, I'm
really not sure when it will be revealed, time will tell ;)

As for the hype, I guess by now you'd think I'm working for them
concidering how many good things I've said about it, but I'm really
not :)
And yes, I would also gladly drop MR as soon as possible.

[Joe Williamsen]

This is exactly why I don't go to strip clubs - having someone tease me with things I can't have... lol...

All joking aside - this is great stuff - keep posting samples.  I, like Kris, would love to dump MR (as long as it doesn't cost more than another seat of Soft, anyway...)

[peter boeykens]

I dont need fancy stuff.

 

Just being able to use the tools we've had for ages, and have them work properly is all I ask for.

 

motion blur, dof, decent sampling levels, FG, Ambocc, displacement, area lights, blurred reflections

you know - pre y2k things...

mental ray is very quick to disappoint with any of these combined - too slow, too much setup needed to get imperfect results.

 

I'll gladly organise a pyre and put all things mental ray related I can find on it.

 

Some official Arnold info would be lovely - otherwise, its gonna be Vray...

[Morten Bartholdy]

So maybe if we create and join a "I want to dump slow MR" on Facebook Mental
Images will begin fixing things so we get a healthy competition going ;)
Seriously, I have been a (sort of) happy MR user since it's infancy in SI3D
and think it is sad how it seems to be dropping behind the development curve
in modern time rendering. It would be a good thing for us all if MI would
feel the pressure from 3Delight, Arnold, Vray and whichever other newer
renderer that seems to be beating it pants down.

Morten Bartholdy
3D & VFX Supervisor

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Bystrom" <andreas...@gmail.com>
To: <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: Arnold pic of the day?

[Christopher]

Amen, my brother can I get a put your hands in the air like you just don't care about MR :)
Anyhow, I agree but how are all of you trying out Arnold ? When could we see Arnold released to Softimage ?

Message: 6
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:23:41 +0200
From: "Morten Bartholdy" <x...@colorshopvfx.dk>

Subject: Re: Arnold pic of the day?

To: <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>
Message-ID: <A46115585C844776965574B526CD6B77@MB01>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original

[Andreas Bystrom]

couple more renders, interiors this time.

http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_sponza.jpg

http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_natural_history.jpg

there is also the classroom which I posted earlier, just another
example showing arnold does interiors well too.
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/Arnold_classroom_01.png

[Eric Thivierge / XSI Database]

Render times?

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
Speakeasy FX

[Malcolm Zaloon]

nice renders, but at closer inspection, all examples are to much noisy.

What the rendertimes?

--
__________________
Malcolm Zaloon - Lighting TD - XSI Generalist

[Andreas Bystrom]

the sponza one was around 10 minutes on an 8 core.

the natural history one was around an hour, classroom was around 40 minutes.

[Steven Caron]

and do you have an mental ray comparisons?

steven

[Andreas Bystrom]

I do of the sponza yes, didn't try the others.
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/mr_sponza.jpg

like that scifi scene this one took about the same time to render as
in arnold, however you have to keep in mind arnold does things the
brute force way, mental ray uses much fewer rays and then interpolates
inbetween them, it should make it faster but the renders also lacks a
lot of detail as you can see in the sponza example.
Also in animation with arnold you will only ever get a light buzzing
effect if sampling isnt set high enough whereas with mental ray you
can get those big blotches jumping around, id much rather have a
little noise than things "boiling" in my animation.

[Nick]

Yummm... those mental ray bumps look gorgeous! ;)
Arnold is looking extremely promising. How do we join the beta?
And is there one for Maya too?

Nick

2009/7/14 Andreas Bystrom <andreas...@gmail.com>

[Christopher]

Arrrgh Stop showing me these Arnold renders STOP THE MADNESS :) Actually I'd like to see some displacement renders and there render times !

Message: 6
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:56:41 -0700
From: Steven Caron <car...@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: Arnold pic of the day?
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Message-ID:

<3167b4110907131456n26...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

[Joe Williamsen]

Man, toggling back and forth between the MR and Arnold renders is quite telling - the Arnold renderer looks SO much better.

Will the Arnold renderer output HDR formats?

Thanks for posting the examples - it's awesome to see this stuff....

[jo...@swiss.se]

Hi Andreas,

Do you have any examples of what this light buzzing effect looks like? And
how much more render time is added when your set the samples high enough
for it to go away? You said the sponza image was 10 mins per frame, how
long does it take with higher samples (animation friendly)?

Impressive stuff so far! Vray and arnold seem like very good candidates
for future render engines.

/ J

[Rui Feliciano]

Great renders and thank you for taking the time for sharing those with us!

Would it be possible for you to share lighting setup for, say, the
natural history picture (how many lights, area/shadow maps, GI, etc.)
and also, how do you feel the difference between lighting a scene
prepared to render with Arnold versus to render it with MR.

Thanks

Rui Feliciano

[Andreas Bystrom]

You can see a tiny bit of noise in this one:
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_gi_anim_rbd.mov
It's a pixel sized noise like with any brute force renderer and a post
noisereduction can often help a lot.
I didn't do any rendertests with different AA sampling but ofcourse it
becomes slower when you add more samples, just like with any renderer.
The "cloudy with a chance of meatballs" trailer linked to here earlier
is all rendered with full noisefree GI, even the interiors, so it's
for sure possible to do this even in feature film. I don't have a
renderfarm at home obviously so I can't render animations that takes
10+ minutes a frame really.

As for the natural history scene, it's basically one arealight in each
window, some 5-6 big arealights and one sunlight, which also is an
arealight, I also used a hdr image outside that gives it that blue
spill as well as GI, the sponza one only has one light.

pretty much all GI renderers behaves in roughly the same way I just
find arnold looks way better, mostly because it's a brute force
algorithm and you can really tell where that extra accuracy goes into,
with mental ray you have to use all sorts of tricks like ambient
occlusion detail enhancement for it to catch the small details in your
models, overall I just find mental ray has too many settings and modes
to use, arnold is very simple and predictable when tweaking the render
settings.

[Alan Fregtman]

Andreas, out of curiosity, what company is currently developing
Arnold? If it was mentioned already, I must've missed it.

[Jordi Riera]

Sony is currently using it in their last movie

--
- Jordi Riera  
- Lighting/Rendering TD
- http://www.kenderland.com
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/jordirieralightingtd
- +32 495 691 961

[Rui Feliciano]

Thank you for taking the time to explain Andreas!

More and more I'm so eager to try either VRay or Arnold where I don't
need to assemble a team of people just to tweak render settings...the
only drag is the ever elusive VRay release date which I hope Arnold does
not follow.

Again, thank you for your replies.

[Sam J. Bowling]

Just curious if you have done any tests with Irradiance
Particles/Importons in XSI.

I've just started messing with them after getting the second i3D tutorials
MR tutorial set and it looks pretty nice once you learn the tricks to
setting it up correctly. I have a simple scene with 11 Portal/area lights
rendering in under a minute.

If any of those test scenes you've been showing are available to download
I'd love to play with them.

--
Sam J. Bowling

[Frank Lenhard]

all our test with irradiance particles resulted in endless
precalculation times. how did you got around that one?

ciao
franky

Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 1:12:54 AM, you wrote:

SJB> Just curious if you have done any tests with Irradiance
SJB> Particles/Importons in XSI.

SJB> I've just started messing with them after getting the second i3D tutorials
SJB> MR tutorial set and it looks pretty nice once you learn the tricks to
SJB> setting it up correctly. I have a simple scene with 11 Portal/area lights
SJB> rendering in under a minute.

SJB> If any of those test scenes you've been showing are available to download
SJB> I'd love to play with them.

SJB> --
SJB> Sam J. Bowling

[Rob Wuijster]

He probably didn't, not with that amount of lights. Or he kept the
settings really low. As soon as the IP maps are done, rendering -is-
fairly quick, I have to admit that.

I've done some testing for archviz recently, but the precalculation is a
b***h, even on my quadcore machine. Not to mention some weirdness with
transparent objects.

Rob

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[Andreas Bystrom]

some of the scenes can be found here:

http://www.3drender.com/challenges/

here is another render of one of them:
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_christmas_scene.jpg
bit early for christmas I know...

I've been looking at interior renders in vray and mr on the cgtalk and
chaosgroup (vray) forums, and rendertimes for interiors is often one
or a couple of hours or more in both renderers for a high quality
picture.
Also I should point out that there is a thread on the cgtalk forums
where people try to match vray like renders in mental ray, it's now
over 120 pages long and has been going for years, bottom line is
people have managed to match the quality, though there is never any
clear conclusion, just thought I would mention this before we end up
with a similar thread on here ;)

I suggest you download some of the scenes from the lighting challenge
site and have a go, it's good fun actually, but comparing rendertimes
for stuff like this, even though I have been guilty of doing it a bit
myself, is actually quite pointless ;)

[Jordi Riera]

I never understood a topic like that.
If you want to do a vray like render, why don't you use vray ?!? (except for the challenge ofc)
Actually, it is the major issue of vray. It is hard to go away a vray like render with vray (strange sentence in fact). MR allows a larger panel of render type from my sight.

I assume if sony is using Arnold, and I can't imagine the design of the movie guided by what Arnold can do, it is not the same with it.

Thanks for these tests and posts, it is really interesting to see other engines.
I am currently working with RM (PRM and 3Delight) and MR is really far from possibilities of RM :/


-*J

[Gene Crucean]

Because vray wasn't (still isn't) available for a lot of people. They want that style and are trying to figure out how to get there with another engine.

Think about a mixed engine environment. **% rendered in MR and **% in vray.

-g

--
Gene Crucean
CG Supervisor/Generalist
** Freelance for hire **

Main email: genecrucean [at] gmail [dot] com

[Joe Williamsen]

The default settings are crazy-high. Start by turning your Rays setting
down to something like 16 and work your way up. You might also disable
Environment and set Iterpolation points to a lower number. As usual
wtih MR, it takes a crapload of fiddling to get the results you want....

[John Payne]

I've been playing around with exporting scenes to Max via crosswalk and rendering with V-Ray to see how it might work in production on certain shots. The main advantages of V-ray that I can see are the availability and quality of it's canned materials\shaders, but renders are long....  You can get some of the same stuff with MR but it might involve rendering some extra passes and render tree tricks on the shaders.  If you have the procs, V-ray can get you there quicker without the mucking about you have to do in MR.  I think this is the pipe over at Blur for the  rendering and lighting TD's, AFAIK.  Maybe Steve Caron can comment here.

- John

[piotrek marczak]

afaik few last cinematics by Blur were rendered with mentalray...in Max. Which I dont understand.


W dniu 2009-07-15 19:25, John Payne pisze:

[John Payne]

Blur's pipe is that they light and render in 3DS MAX.  Not sure how often they might utilize some of the other renderers like V-ray, Brazil or Final
Render,  (Cebas lists blur as a client).  After some frustrations with MR a coupe of years ago I was desperate enough to consider using MAX to
light and render, (please no flames)  :).   The future is looking brighter though.

2009/7/15 piotrek marczak <orig...@gmail.com>

[Malcolm Zaloon]

Piotrek, 

Don´t undertand?!

MR and Renderman are production proven! An fully scalable!

Both are very versatile, and programmable.

simple.

2009/7/15 piotrek marczak <orig...@gmail.com>

[piotrek marczak]

I know :) I don't understand why *in MAX*...
I know they used Brazil, which is not and won't be available in softimage..but mray...in max ?

W dniu 2009-07-15 20:32, Malcolm Zaloon pisze:

[John Payne]

I'm revealing my age here, but way back when Blur started doing cinematics in ye olden days of the 486 and Pentium, they were
solely a 3DStudio and Max shop.  I think you are seeing that legacy in the pipe.

My oh my how things have changed, Kudos to everyone at Blur who built the studio.  I'll never that forget the Blur T-shirt from the 96
(or maybe 2000), Siggraph.

2009/7/15 piotrek marczak <orig...@gmail.com>

I know :) I don't understand why *in MAX*...
I know they used Brazil, which is not and won't be available in softimage..but mray...in max ?

W dniu 2009-07-15 20:32, Malcolm Zaloon pisze:

Piotrek, 

Don´t undertand?!

MR and Renderman are production proven! An fully scalable!

Both are very versatile, and programmable.

simple.

[tak...@earthlink.net]

Isn't mental ray licensing in Max different?  As in free?

-T

-----Original Message-----
From: John Payne
Sent: Jul 15, 2009 3:06 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Arnold pic of the day?

[John Payne]

That would be too easy.  I love that "At no additional charge".

mental ray Satellite Software

• Contains the same functionality as the integrated mental ray renderer.
• Assists in distributing render jobs over processors located across a network.
• Includes eight licenses with each 3ds Max license, at no additional charge.*

[Gene Crucean]

When you render through backburner it's 100% free. You just install max on all of the nodes and leave them as 30day trials with no license.

... it was last time I checked anyway.

[piotrek marczak]

ahh money...didn't think about that

John: it's about satellite rendering (one frame rendered by multiple computers)
network rendering is AFAIK free 999 licenses

Vray is also free for network rendering

W dniu 2009-07-15 21:28, John Payne pisze:

[Ciaran Moloney]

That's only for satellite, who in their right mind uses that?
But if you use backburner to manage your batch renders, it only uses a single license for all machines. i.e. you could have a whole render farm running expired demos of Max, with a single commercial license. I hear this is pretty common amongst Max users, but the licensing issues of this seem foggy to me at best (re: Max not Mental Ray).

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 3:28 PM, John Payne <johnwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Gene Crucean]

VRay network rendering is free for max users. Vlado isn't sure yet for the SI version.

2009/7/15 piotrek marczak <orig...@gmail.com>

[John Payne]

Yea I wasn't sure about the licensing so I looked on the Autodesk web site and made an assumption about
Satellite vs. network licensing scheme.  If what you say is true about 999 licenses that certainly is the trump card
legacy or no legacy.

[Steven Caron]

well i am not actually a lighting td, i do character rigging and tools here.. but i am part of the pipeline team and know a lot about all aspects of production here.

modeling = package of choice
texturing = 3dsmax, asset needs to be finaled in 3dsmax
environment modeling/texturing = mostly 3dsmax, but same rules apply as above
rigging/animation = softimage, then we point cache using .pc2
scene assembly/lighting = load point caches on meshes for rendering in mental ray in 3dsmax.
fx = 3dsmax, and whatever renderer will render whatever plugin they are using. so hair could be brazil or scanline. fumefx is scanline many times.

we have access to vray, final render, krakatoa, afterburn, etc but these aren't used as much as mental ray.

steven

[Steven Caron]

cebas list them as a client mostly because of TP, but we do own licenses of FR.

[John Payne]

Hi Steven, 

Thanks for the breakdown and info.

- John

[Sam J. Bowling]

Lower the settings. the default settings are WAY too high. 1 is way too big
a number! That's about as much as I want to say without feeling like I'm
giving away things from i3d tutorials. I never had a render on a somewhat
simple scene that took more than 15 minutes and most were closer to 5 (this
is with about 12 9x9 area lights). There are a lot of good tips in the i3D
Tutorials video, so if you can afford it, I would recommend it. i3D Jack
sounds like he may actually work in the industry (unlike the guys who sell
the other crappy training), and seems to have a good grip on mental ray.

On a side note, in Maya and Max you can set the number of Importons. In SI
setting a density of 1 will give you way, way too many Importons. Why does
SI feel the need to rename everything? I've noticed countless times that
many mental ray setting do not match up in names with either Maya, Max or
even the MR Docs. Doesn't this just add confusions and make it more
difficult to migrate from other packages?

A great example is that everyone thinks IP is terribly slow because with
the Density set to 1 ("the lowest number") it takes forever to render
anything. If the default was set to .1 it would be better, but the best
thing seems to be to actually allow us to set a real number for the
density. There may be a good reason for this, but I can't seem to figure it
out.

--
Sam J. Bowling

[Sam J. Bowling]

Awesome, thanks for the link. The Natural History scene should keep me busy
for a while. =)

--
Sam J. Bowling

[Joe Williamsen]

I'll second that - the i3D tutorials on XSI/MR are worth the money. If
they save me an hour of fiddling, they've easily paid for themselves..

[Andreas Bystrom]

here's yet another example I made a few days ago (it's an old model I
made years ago)
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_drone.mov

2-2.5minutes per frame (8 core) with 30 segments motionblur as well as
DOF, pretty much all of the plane also uses glossy reflection though
it's very subtle so I could have probably gone without that.

here is yet another silly test with instances:
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_245_billion_polys.jpg
245 billion polys, 250.000 instances.
http://ericknelson.com/wurp/arnold_245_billion_polys_closeup.jpg
I guess the only real use for this many instances is if you had a
landscape full of trees for example, some time ago I made a job with
something like that in xsi and with mental ray I sometimes had to have
around 100 passes for it to even render.

[Morten Bartholdy]

- and the silly test - do you have rendertimes for those?

Can't wait for the release.

- MB

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Bystrom" <andreas...@gmail.com>
To: <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 2:51 PM
Subject: Re: Arnold pic of the day?

[Jordi Riera]

Any talk about Arnold during the siggraph of NO ?

I would really want to learn more about it.

-*J

[Andreas Bystrom]

Im not sure about the rendertimes of the tank cluster, i did it in the
region, but it wasn't really that long, probably well under 10
minutes.

[Rares Halmagean]

Very nice work Andreas. That is an impressive render time. Arnold is looking really promising. I think the glossy reflection although subtle helps in making the model that much more convincing.

rares halmagean   |  3d art director

[Rob Wuijster]

Andreas,

Enough is enough....
Stop teasing us like this, it's just not right. ;-)

Renders looks awesome, and if it's not coming out soon, I'm pretty sure
there is a ton of people on the list eager to beta test this thing into
perfection.

Can you say if there's -anything- revealed on Siggy?? ;-)

Keep the renders coming though, it's all very interesting to see.

rob

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[Sam Cuttriss]

Radish.....

has someone set you loose with a dashing signature image?

Rares Halmagean wrote:
> Very nice work Andreas. That is an impressive render time. Arnold is
> looking really promising. I think the glossy reflection although
> subtle helps in making the model that much more convincing.
>

[Bradley Gabe]

Sam-

Poor Rares was found at his desk just before lunch, frozen still and unresponsive. Apparently he had been reading your reply in his email the moment it happened. He was obviously shaken, but could not be stirred.

[Rares Halmagean]

Very appropriate responses, thank you :-) . Sorry about the signature. Forgot my manners in haste to respond.