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Cycles X

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Re: Cycles X

#31

Post by raphlinus »

birktj wrote: post #23

> 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?

My perspective is that OpenCL is indeed in that bad shape, though it does have defenders. Both AMD (ROCm) and Intel (oneAPI) have ways to run workloads originally written to run on CUDA, but they're nowhere near the level of polish as CUDA.

I believe an open stack can and will emerge, but it will take time and effort on all levels of the stack. It's possible to do pretty amazing things with Vulkan compute shaders, but the programming model is different than CUDA (it's not single-source), and the tooling support is not quite there.

In time, I am hopeful that WebGPU will gather more momentum, and be officially supported even in places where Vulkan requires janky adapter layers. But in its current form, it's very immature and far from being usable for real workloads.

Re: Cycles X

#32

Post by zamadatix »

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…

Cycles works a bit differently but the same general idea is supposed to be implemented via "CPU viewport rendering with Open Image Denoiser" which live denoises the rendering in a more advanced way. Unfortunately the video for that section doesn't seem to be set up correctly so you can't actually see it in action.

Re: Cycles X

#33

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.

Oh, I also didn't catch this:

> what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?

So I often have hobby projects (that I sometimes complete, heh) where I would rather sketch it out in Blender so I could more easily figure out what it is I want to build. Sure, I could be using something like Solidworks, but I've just never felt like I needed a full on CAD suite to do what I need. The process helps me design physical objects and decide what parts I'll need to either buy or 3D print.

One such example is a 16mm film scanner I've been meaning to build. I have a 16mm projector and collect 16mm films, and some films you can find on eBay are kind of obscure. So I thought it would be fun to build something to scan them since it would use my programming talent and involve controlling stepper motors.

That was actually where I gave up on Maya completely. I had used Blender for some things already so the transition was pretty easy, but I have more experience in Maya overall. After having it crash on something basic, not even potentially weird operations like booleans (which every other 3D software package gets right), I decided to abandon Maya entirely and hopefully I won't ever have to look back.

Re: Cycles X

#34

Post by haldean »

qwertox wrote: post #30
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…

There’s Geometry Nodes now which let you write smaller procedurals that you can combine together the way you’re describing: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_...

They’re extremely new (2.92 I think) so the framework is there but there aren’t many nodes yet; 2.93 introduced a whole bunch of new nodes though.

Re: Cycles X

#35

Post by wlesieutre »

DonHopkins wrote: post #26
wlesieutre wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 menu…

Even better!

Re: Cycles X

#36

Post by qwertox »

haldean wrote: post #34
qwertox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There’s Geometry Nodes now which let you write smaller procedurals that you can combine together the way you’re describing: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_... They’re extremely new (2.92 I think) so the framework is there but there aren’t many nodes yet; 2.93 introduced a whole bunch of new nodes though.

Excellent! The fact that there's something as basic as the Boolean Math node [1] kind of shows that this is something evolving into that direction. I will definitely look at it and search for the C-code on GitHub. Thanks.

[1] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_...

Edit: Hmm, it appears to not have a C++ API.

Re: Cycles X

#37

Post by jpm48 »

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 think one of the main issues for Big studios is the whole pipeline is based around Maya / Houdini and it is easy to get artists who know these tools. It's hard to switch and takes time (see how many studios are still using Python 2.x as a switch to 3 will break so much). I know a lot of people are beginning to look at blender (mainly due to cost and the new licensing models from Autodesk). It is really expensive for studios to use now.

Re: Cycles X

#38

Post by lattalayta »

ravenstine wrote: post #22
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…

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…

In my opinion, most of the 3D software and renderers are starting to align in their workflows and set up. If you've spent enough time in a 3D package and have your fundamentals down, then a reasonably experienced 3D artist could make something look good in Maya, Blender, Cinema 4D, UE4, 3ds Max, Modo, or slightly more specialized programs like Katana, Mari, Nuke, etc. Most of the "learning curve" is just finding out what a particular program calls one tool or another. I think this video starts to illustrate what I mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkvRBvKHFek

Also, at studios, you tend to hear about the "main" pipeline where the majority of the work flows through. There are often secondary, smaller pipelines where they evaluate new tools and workflows before committing to entire rewrites. I would agree that small to medium sized studios don't have the resources or luxury to do as much exploration

Re: Cycles X

#39

Post by dagmx »

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…

Blender has a lot of things lacking however:

* It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key

* Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL.

* Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn't allow for it in the way they need unless they fork the whole app.

*Blender has no professional support contract. This is very important for studios.

I think Blender is awesome, but a lot of the stuff that makes it appeal to freelancers doesn't appeal to big studios. In some cases like the licensing, it pushes them away.

Re: Cycles X

#40

Post by kroltan »

qwertox wrote: post #30
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…

In addition to Geometry Nodes [0], and the "Everything Nodes" initiative [1], you might be interested in Sverchok [2] too, which implements this kind of graph-based parametric/procedural modeling technique.

[0]: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_...

[1]: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Nodes/EverythingNodes

[2]: http://nortikin.github.io/sverchok/

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