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Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

appleseedhq.net

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Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#11

Post by fizixer »

erichocean wrote: post #6

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

- I've never heard of Tungsten.

- Mitsuba is a mainly-academic renderer by Wenzel Jakob (I say mainly because I haven't seen its widespread use in non-academic setting).

The two important open source renderers that are missing in comparison:

- Cycles (comes with Blender; produces great results although it is said that it only recently has started doing a "PBR workflow")

- Luxrender (very popular with artists on deviantart; has very good OpenCL support)

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#12

Post by erichocean »

fizixer wrote: post #11
erichocean wrote: post #6

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

- I've never heard of Tungsten. - Mitsuba is a mainly-academic renderer by Wenzel Jakob (I say mainly because I haven't seen its widespread use in non-academic setting). The two important open source renderers that are missing in comparison: - Cycles (comes with Blender; produces great results although it is said that it only recently has started doing a "PBR workflow") - Luxrender (very popular with artists on devia…

That's because the point of the comparison is not to compare with other renderers, it's to check feature correctness. Mitsuba is widely used for that purpose.

Almost no one uses LuxRender or Cycles commercially to the best of my knowledge (or appleseed for that matter). Hobbyists use them, which is cool.

I'm in Los Angeles and work in the industry. Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. I don't think Renderman and Arnold are used much outside of VFX. Arnold in particular is pricey, but works amazingly well.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#13

Post by nickpsecurity »

erichocean wrote: post #6

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them?

Just a few things that popped into my mind looking at them. Wouldn't mind learning a little more in objectively evaluating the renderers.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#15

Post by Mathnerd314 »

erichocean wrote: post #9
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Improving" is kind of a strong statement. See for example this recent PR: https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/pull/1217/files . It seems like they just keep adding and removing special cases, so there's code churn but not really progress in any particular direction...

Perhaps I'm easier to please. The article your linked to was publish in October 2015. Just this year they've added code[0] to support alSurface[1], which I consider to be a significant (and unexpected) feature improvement. Their news page[2] (to me) shows significant improvements since late 2015 as well, and it looks like the 1.7.x beta is just around the corner[3]. [0] https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/commit…

Yeah, there's some progress. But it's slow, compared to other projects. E.g. Tensorflow was released November 2015 and already has 1.7x as many commits and 25x as many committers, and companies like IBM are adding support for it to their toolkits: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/ibm-adds-support-for-googl... (roughly like what Maya did for Arnold, although Autodesk just bought the whole company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzoHAhODpi8)

Maybe it's not possible to make a similar kind of pipeline/platform-type thing for renderers, and they really do need all that material/shader garbage, but I always have been kind of disappointed with the state of the art...

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#16

Post by erichocean »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #13
erichocean wrote: post #6

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them? Just a few things that…

The color differences are from different "tone mapping" implementations after the render is stopped and can be ignored.

The point of that page is to evaluate renderer correctness (think of them as visual unit tests), not to really compare "which one looks better". For example, some of the images show appleseed with hard shadows, when they should be soft.

If you want to know which one is "right", Mitsuba is the one to look at as it's generally the most correct.

The graininess comes from not letting the machine renderer longer—the longer it goes, the less grainy it will be. That said, all of these renderers employ "tricks" to reduce the graininess that can make it practically impossible to remove whatever graininess slips through.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#17

Post by hobofan »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #13
erichocean wrote: post #6

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them? Just a few things that…

> And what's up with the graininess of all of them?

I am not a rendering expert either but IIRC "physical rendering" works by shooting photons across the scene based on a random distribution, and in the end, the finished rendering is an average version of all photon passes. If you don't shoot enough photons, the averaged out version will be noisy because there will be some hotspots were significantly more photons hit, relative to the total photon count. More photons = longer rendering time, so the graininess is in the end probably caused by a time constraint enforced for each of the images.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#18

Post by TulliusCicero »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #15
erichocean wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm easier to please. The article your linked to was publish in October 2015. Just this year they've added code[0] to support alSurface[1], which I consider to be a significant (and unexpected) feature improvement. Their news page[2] (to me) shows significant improvements since late 2015 as well, and it looks like the 1.7.x beta is just around the corner[3]. [0] https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/commit…

Yeah, there's some progress. But it's slow, compared to other projects. E.g. Tensorflow was released November 2015 and already has 1.7x as many commits and 25x as many committers, and companies like IBM are adding support for it to their toolkits: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/ibm-adds-support-for-googl... (roughly like what Maya did for Arnold, although Autodesk just bought the whole company: https://www.youtube…

Tensorflow is also managed by the most influential tech company in the world.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#19

Post by hellofunk »

redpanda_ua wrote: post #14

It's all cool and awesome, but why put all those resources into new renderer, when one could contribute to Blender and such, which are way more mature?

Two points:

Blender is not a renderer, it's a modelling and animation program with a built-in renderer, Cycles. But it can connect to other renderers, too.

Cycles is not that old. It replaced Blender's prior renderer just a few years ago.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#20

Post by Mathnerd314 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #18
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's some progress. But it's slow, compared to other projects. E.g. Tensorflow was released November 2015 and already has 1.7x as many commits and 25x as many committers, and companies like IBM are adding support for it to their toolkits: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/ibm-adds-support-for-googl... (roughly like what Maya did for Arnold, although Autodesk just bought the whole company: https://www.youtube…

Tensorflow is also managed by the most influential tech company in the world.

Right; Tensorflow is managed well, and working on it might lead to a job, while appleseed seems like yet another open-source time sink with few prospects.

Obviously money isn't everything, so maybe there's a better criteria for judging projects, but at least on the "lasting impact on the world" front appleseed seems to fall short...

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