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Cycles X

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Re: Cycles X

#21

Post by gmueckl »

monkmartinez wrote: post #7
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Just an observation and a point of discussion regarding the big studios. Disclaimer, I am not in this space professionally, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts about VR/AR which spills into all of these topics. Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game eng…

The problem with UE4 in film/animation is about the the place it should occupy in the pipeline. Being a game engine at its core, it's fundamentally designed to ingest models and render images. So its natural place is at the end of the pipeline. There's no really good roundtrip capabilties that let you e.g. export a scene that was created in UE for use in other tools. So despite the interactivity that would let you e.g. block out a scene with awesome real time feedback, there's no good way to get the data out into a different animation or lighting tool for final touchups before it goes to an offline renderer. This is why some big animiation studios have invested a lot of effort into in-house realtime preview renderers that attach to their tool pipelines with less friction.

Re: Cycles X

#22

Post by ravenstine »

monkmartinez wrote: post #7
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Just an observation and a point of discussion regarding the big studios. Disclaimer, I am not in this space professionally, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts about VR/AR which spills into all of these topics. Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game eng…

I'm not in the field myself, though animation was my original career and I know people who work in feature animation.

To answer your question, the field has been sloooowly diversifying in some ways, as you say with Unreal (particularly since Unreal's engine is fast and good for real-time previews), but I don't see a huge push for moving away from does-it-all packages like Maya or 3DS Max. The economic incentive isn't there. Studios have figured out how to make their money and are comfortable with the pipelines that they already have. This isn't to say their pipelines are good. In fact, many of you would be shocked at just how bad most animation pipelines are at big studios. Not only are they way too vendor-locked (as is kind of the case with Maya), but they don't want to pay an adequate salary for qualified software engineers who can build better pipelines and write more software that's agnostic. Of course, I'm making sweeping generalizations, but this is the kind of story I've heard more often than not. Pixar is known for having good practices and they write (and sell) their own software, but I don't closely know anyone who has worked there.

It's going to take a decline in the field of animation before studios realize that they're basically stuck in 2006 in terms of how their artists are working to make their content. I won't mention them here, but people at certain major studios have been trying to get things like Unreal for 10+ years and never get approval to receive licenses for it and they never do because higher ups don't believe they'd see a monetary return on investment. Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.

In case I didn't make it clear, I'm pretty much an outsider at this point, so I'm sure there may be some more relevant viewpoints here that would contradict mine. I don't intend to be authoritative.

Re: Cycles X

#23

Post by birktj »

> Deprecation

> OpenCL rendering kernels. The combination of the limited Cycles split kernel implementation, driver bugs, and stalled OpenCL standard has made maintenance too difficult.

I am not really up to date on the GPGPU world, but is OpenCL in such a bad shape that it is not really usable? If so that is very sad. Are there any alternative open hardware agnostic GPGPU apis or has CUDA eaten the entire market?

Re: Cycles X

#24

Post by ravenstine »

bredren wrote: post #18
ravenstine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not because it was warez. I know people who work with Maya in productions; everybody knows that Maya is crash prone to varying extents. It's the least reliable software I've ever used. It does a TON, and it's otherwise pretty awesome, but it's embarrassingly buggy. I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school…

:) It was hard to tell what was what back then. Thanks for sharing those notes on your character animation background. I'm curious what drove you to be interested in mixing CGI / live action. Jurassic Park, perhaps? When I was a kid Roger Rabbit and Cool World were amazing to me. JP's CGI seemed different, as though the dinosaurs were real.

It was The Incredibles. That and my father was and still is an animator. But The Incredibles really got me interested because it was both pretty advanced for its time and had what I still consider to be a more mature storyline than even most animated films today. I definitely know what you mean about Roger Rabbit!

Re: Cycles X

#25

Post by gmueckl »

vjeux wrote: post #15

When I was working on a ray tracer, I found that interpolating the color from neighboring points instead of leaving it blank for in-progress elements was a huge improvement for quickly seeing what the scene is going to look like. In the video examples it doesn't seem like they're doing it. I'm interested to know the rationale. (See "Progressive Rendering" section for an example: https://blog.vjeux.com/2012/javascript…

What do you mean by blank pixels? Cycles is a MC path tracer. This means that it will always trace some paths that don't find high contributions to the final image. When this happens for the first couple of iterations when rendering progressively, these pixels stay darker than the rest. This is just how the algorithm works. You could try to apply a denoiser, but then you're not using the computational power to shoot more rays and you're replacing noise with bias.

Re: Cycles X

#26

Post by DonHopkins »

wlesieutre wrote: post #17
weinzierl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad The last time I tried Blender - which admittedly is a while - it was practically unusable with a trackpad. Has this changed?

One major change is that it now defaults to select with left click, which should help things. There's also an official Pie Menus add-on that lets you fit more controls in a smaller laptop keyboard. Numpad is the normal way to switch between view directions, but having them in a radial menu keeps it reasonably usable. Lack of middle-mouse drag could be awkward and I don't know the solution off the top of my head, but…

Pie menus are actually build into Blender now, but there's also a great Pie Menu Editor add-on that lets you easily build you own pie menus and other user interface widgets without coding in Python! Which is very important for making efficient custom workflows.

https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor

Alias (and now Autodesk) has been abusing the patent system and spreading FUD about marking/pie/radial menus being patented for decades, which inhibited 3dsmax and Blender from supporting them for many years. But now Blender has excellent support for pie menus, and they're not encumbered by patents.

Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”:

https://miro.medium.com/max/534/1*3C79dFnlhN__OJ3XmEjN9A.png

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_b...

Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...

>The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades

>Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).

>As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:

https://blenderartists.org/t/when-will-marking-menu-patent-e...

>"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."

Re: Cycles X

#27

Post by ravenstine »

gmueckl wrote: post #21
monkmartinez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an observation and a point of discussion regarding the big studios. Disclaimer, I am not in this space professionally, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts about VR/AR which spills into all of these topics. Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game eng…

The problem with UE4 in film/animation is about the the place it should occupy in the pipeline. Being a game engine at its core, it's fundamentally designed to ingest models and render images. So its natural place is at the end of the pipeline. There's no really good roundtrip capabilties that let you e.g. export a scene that was created in UE for use in other tools. So despite the interactivity that would let you e.…

That's an excellent point about why they would rather write their own in-house software. Of course they then get saddled with having to support all of that software and may struggle to do so, which is another problem in itself.

Re: Cycles X

#28

Post by whoisthisguy »

I used Cinema 4D for years and a few months ago I gave a try to Blender. I have to say I was extremely impressed. I did some digging and it turns out Blender has an amazing product focused management thats main goal is to serve the users. Extremely well executed product management.

Re: Cycles X

#29

Post by gmueckl »

mroche wrote: post #20
gmueckl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot. The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are com…

Some of us admins in the field like to joke that Autodesk isn't a software vendor, they are a licensing company. And to be honest some of their changes with regards to Named User Licensing is going to be a PITA for many studios. I've gotten the chance to have a few conversations with some on the Maya team before, and they are great people. But they are fairly hamstrung by a company focused on sales and growth than de…

Media & Entertainment being a tiny part of their revenue fits with the general wisdom that the market for general purpose 3D software is virtually non-existent. The software is costly to build and maintain and combined with a small customer base and thus high licencing prices, this is a killer.

Re: Cycles X

#30

Post by qwertox »

ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

I learned Maya on Irix, then purchased a License for Plug In development on Windows around 2004, which was pre-Python support. I really got to knew the DAG very well, as well as rendering custom helper tools in the viewport. It was extremely flexible to extend.

I've also kept an eye on Blender since then, and no other piece of OSS causes me so much joy to see the improvements it makes version after version, specially because they are usually linked to small movies which demonstrate the capabilities.

But the few times I've taken a look at the Python SDK, I've felt a bit turned off. It somehow felt a bit like Cinema4D, where you had this huge API to code against, but never ended up with small modules (DAG nodes) which were pretty much stand-alone utilities which you could then connect to anything Maya had to offer.

I've seen that Blender lately has something which feels a bit similar, but it appears to be limited to shading pipelines (Shader Nodes).

There are no such transform, group, deformer nodes and stuff like that which allows you to manipulate geometry, correct?

I mean, in Maya I'd build a simple data node (in C++) which had an input, and I'd route the xyz of an object to the xzy-input of my data node, and then apply particle physics to that object and hit play, and the data node would then obtain a "data stream" in its xyz-input representing the object's position, as a very trivial example. Even vertices could be "streamed" into such data nodes. How would I do such a thing in Blender (with Python)?

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