We all know that blender scanline render is pretty fast, but far away from getting quality of the "big guys"...

yes... we have exporters to good free renderers (yafray, pov, and all the rib guys) that has all the stuff needed to make nowadays quality images.... Radiosity, GI, hdri, light tracing, caustics, dof..... time expensive techniques that give us the needed power to make similar images to commercial packages.... that's good... but while live in the past if you can be parto of the future of rendering?

I'm sure every of you know about Paul Devec (pioner head on HDRI, image modelling, and ambient occlussion lightihing.... at the webpage you can download an ambient occlussion program that let you change IN REAL TIME the ilumination on some downloadadable images scanned with special hardware... Probably that's the near future of computer illumination....

here you can view a maya script that uses the same tech of debevec for ambient occlussion lightning
http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/amb_occlude.html

well, blender has a very fast scanline render suitable for doing such type of image calculations, and what's more important blender doesn't uses too much ram... so maybe blender could be the first renderer to include this type of hdri advanced -ULTRA FAST- illumination tool....

Just take a look to that if you are one of the code-wizards that improves blender render

aqa wrote:

We all know that blender scanline render is pretty fast, but far away from getting quality of the "big guys"... yes... we have exporters to good free renderers (yafray, pov, and all the rib guys) that has all the stuff needed to make nowadays quality images.... Radiosity, GI, hdri, light tracing, caustics, dof..... time expensive techniques that give us the needed power to make similar images to commercial packages.... that's good... but while live in the past if you can be parto of the future of rendering? I'm sure every of you know about Paul Devec (pioner head on HDRI, image modelling, and ambient occlussion lightihing.... at the webpage you can download an ambient occlussion program that let you change IN REAL TIME the ilumination on some downloadadable images scanned with special hardware... Probably that's the near future of computer illumination.... here you can view a maya script that uses the same tech of debevec for ambient occlussion lightning http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/amb_occlude.html well, blender has a very fast scanline render suitable for doing such type of image calculations, and what's more important blender doesn't uses too much ram... so maybe blender could be the first renderer to include this type of hdri advanced -ULTRA FAST- illumination tool.... Just take a look to that if you are one of the code-wizards that improves blender render

1. HDRI images are made by taking several pictures of a big reflective sphere with a normal(film or digital, doesnt matter) camera, but using different exposure lengths. So you get different levels of light on the image. You then use an application that analyzes the different images to create a hdri image that has a color range that can go over the color range of normal images. There is no really big difference between a hdri image and a normal rgb image. the hdri image just has more information in it, more levels of lighting. So i dont think you can say that you are changing the lighting in realtime. Its no different then normal images, the result is just better.

2. You mention free raytracers, the renderman integration i have been working on can now render out a ambient occlusion pass. So there is not much point in integrating ambient occlusion into blenders internal renderer since you are still going to just render it out as a pass and composite it together with other images, those images could be rendered with blender, yafray, povray etc..

Hey green, since you mentioned it... how is the renderman integration goin? Not too bother you about it... just interested in how the development is progressing.

Pablosbrain wrote:

Hey green, since you mentioned it... how is the renderman integration goin? Not too bother you about it... just interested in how the development is progressing.

Well.

What I have left to do:

Support for multiple materials per object.
Support for more material editor buttons
Getting rid of most bugs
Getting the output to be somewhat similar to blenders output (colors, light strength etc..)
Writing documentation
Cleaning up the ui.


Then it should be ready for release.
(I guess its about 2-3 months left)

This means that alot of things wont be supported. Like particle systems, halos, most things in the world buttons, and alot of buttons in the material editor and texture editor and lamp editor will not be supported. But support for them will come after some time.

Very cool! I look forward to seeing it evolve and grow as it has already! Keep up the great work!

welll... you cath me....

that's the reason while i haven't try any of that rib renderes nor povray nor nothing that takes long to render and a nightmare to get it working (python stuff and that things)....

well, i know that for most of you , coders, linux users, and clever people there isn't any nightmare in using python, shading languages and all that tech stuff.....

so forguet it, anyway, in two years all the 3d packages will make that fast hdri ambient occlussion, because it's the fastest and easiest way to get a natural good looking animations.... and probably to get good looking images in complex scenes blender maybe needs a much more quality and fastest radiosity to calculate the occlussion before aplying the light environment.

thanx for your opinion anyway