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Cycles X

code.blender.org

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Re: Cycles X

#81

Post by w-m »

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?

Yes it’s that bad unfortunately. Ok, so you got you kernel working and it performs well. That’s quite an achievement, because most tooling is atrocious, and profiling tools nonexistent for many platforms.

Now you want to run this on the users machine. You are of course using an ancient OpenCL version, because very few vendors updates their OpenCL drivers. Situation has gotten so bad that the consortium had to basicallly roll back much of the newer standard because nobody sipported it.

Anyway, the users GPU has the right capabilities and should run your code fine. But it doesn’t. If you’re lucky, you get an error message. Often you don’t, either you get a cryptic error code with zero Google results, or the OpenCL compiler just crashes. That actually happens quite often.

In summary, if you want to support many different GPUs in different OSes, you’re in a world of pain, because everything is half-baked.

There was a letter by the Blender devs to Apple a couple years ago to get their shit together and fix their OpenCL driver. I don’t think they ever did, just deprecated it and told you to use Metal...

Re: Cycles X

#82

Post by mathnode »

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…

Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.

Adobe is their Microsoft.

Re: Cycles X

#83

Post by nine_k »

gmueckl wrote: post #29
mroche wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some reason, enough resources is infused into Blender for it to be competitive, even though it does not bring any sales or licensing revenue.

I wonder if the market is that small.

Re: Cycles X

#84

Post by sudosysgen »

dogma1138 wrote: post #47
raphlinus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

ROCm is a total mess, and is Linux only. OneAPI is in a rather good state considering it’s barely a release candidate now I’ll put my money on Blender support Intel GPUs sooner than AMD ones with Cycles X unless AMD will adopt OneAPI.

OneAPI/SYCL also works on AMD if the card supports ROCM.

Re: Cycles X

#85

Post by tizzdogg »

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…

“ Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.”

Sorry but that’s completely wrong. Almost every animation or vfx studio is barely scraping by. Margins have been reduced so much for film work it’s extremely difficult to turn a profit, which is why so much work is outsourced overseas these days. The reason software isn’t better is because they barely have the resources to improve it.

Everyone’s aware of newer tools, but things like unreal still arnt as good as traditional non-realtime pipelines in terms of flexibility and scalability.

Re: Cycles X

#86

Post by jollybean »

gmueckl wrote: post #16
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…

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…

Autodesk and Adobe have become a problem, the lack of competition and incumbency mean they are basically milking the same cow ad nauseam.

To be a little bit fair - those systems are in fact very complex, and it is quite a big deal to do anything in them. But literally as I speak Photoshop will not go 'fullscreen' on my Mac, and Adobe blames this utterly ridiculous bug on Apple. Which may very well be the case but whoever is 'at fault' - things are retrograding a little bit.

I sense there is opportunity for a new angle on things.

Re: Cycles X

#87

Post by yowzadave »

gmueckl wrote: post #29
mroche wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Autodesk does an equally poor job maintaining their Architecture and Engineering softwares, despite them being a larger market. GP’s comments about the state of Maya hold true for AutoCAD and Revit as well.

Re: Cycles X

#88

Post by Olumde »

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…

Maya's grip on the VFX companies is, I suspect, in part due to how Maya has been built into the pipelines and tools that many companies use, which is only possible because of Maya's fantastic API. I haven't used the API in anger in about 10 years, but it was amazing back them. Very well designed.

Now if Blender had a comparable API that VFX studios could build on Blender would have a better shot at eating Maya's lunch. I predict that smaller companies with smaller budgets and almost no custom software will be the early adopters of Blenders and will pave the way for bigger companies.

Re: Cycles X

#89

Post by [deleted] »

tizzdogg wrote: post #85
ravenstine wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“ Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.” Sorry but that’s completely wrong. Almost every animation or vfx studio is barely scraping by. Margins have been reduced so much for film work it’s extremely difficult to turn a profit, which is why so much work is outsourced overseas these days. The reason software isn’t better is because they barely have the resources to improve i…

[deleted]

Re: Cycles X

#90

Post by 542458 »

gmueckl wrote: post #25
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…

Sorry, what is MC an acronym for here?
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