Nvidia FX composer

[JWalton]

any ideas spring from this:

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_c ... ome.html#1

[Money_YaY!]

d@mmmm it's all in real time to I just dont understand why coders will not work at getting the gpu to do the render work... I was talking to a dev a bit ago and he had lots to explain about it but nothing i could find that lead to it being impossible.

I mean really really this would solve alot of render speed issues and could lead to lots of animations as building and testing them would be sooooo much faster.

[z3r0_d]

I mean really really this would solve alot of render speed issues and could lead to lots of animations as building and testing them would be sooooo much faster.

this has been discussed [with respect to the renderer] before

I don't think that using hardware accelerated rendering would be a good idea if you try a render farm [because there is no guarntee of the same output on different brand or even different model video cards].

However, it could lead to nice previews

... whatever happens, at some point blender needs to have some reasonable interface to glsl for at least game content. [tuhopuu2 supported glsl in the game engine...]

[halibut]

So are games made with the game engine not hardware accellerated?

[z3r0_d]

So are games made with the game engine not hardware accellerated?

basically, yes, they are hardware accelerated


all drawing that blender does [well, the color of rendered pixels [not game engine] is determined by blender's renderer on the cpu, but the drawing of these pixels is no exception] is hardware accelerated [if the hardware chooses to accelerate it]

so, if your drivers are capable of it, the game engine is hardware accelerated

FX composer is a way to create EFFECTS beyond what the game engine is capable of now. There is no guarntee the hardware [and drivers] support this stuff, for example the geforce 2 cannot do pixel shaders nor vertex shaders, but the driver lets vertex shaders work just fine by doing them on the CPU [perhaps I'm talking about the geforce 4 mx, but that is a geforce 2...].

a high level shading language [glsl or hlsl] and pixel shaders will not make blender faster, but vertex shaders probably could [last I heard armature deformation was done on the cpu, but the determination of uv coordinates for sphere mapped textures could be as well].

[Money_YaY!]

eeeeyah.. Ok the render farm would be a bit of a trouble, BUT useing this would greatly increase the amount of output though still no render farm for now.

The GLSL stuff. Is that possible ? Like as in a tech that all of the coders can agree on? What was tons take on it ? He seems to be reediting the render code right now but never saw him reply on glsl.

My only understanding beyond the scope of code would be that if we could use the faster previews in either the render button game engine or 3d view, it would allow 'much' greater tweaking power and saved time to add to the tweaking phase. As that is usually really the longest phase of all. And couple that with the sudo realtime antialiasing http://search.ati.com/nasearch.asp?Quer ... =&Stat=New (cant find animage right now) Could make it as a realrender engine. Of course the quality still need to get better but that is increaseing so fast now in outside development, that it would just be a good thing for blender to be ready and primed with a working example waiting for the stuff to get better instead of still playing catchup,.

[alien-xmp]

I'm pretty sure FX composer is DirectX only at the moment. ATI's RenderMonkey supports GLSL, and is quite good for developing shaders on Windows.

[JWalton]

I'm pretty sure FX composer is DirectX only at the moment. ATI's RenderMonkey supports GLSL, and is quite good for developing shaders on Windows.

correct it is directX only.

[joeri]

I don't see the need for a renderfarm if I can render realtime.
And if I have very much frames to render they are hardly going to be in 1 shot. So a scene to machine assignment would work fine.

[hashman]

I’ve been all over the net trying to find a product that will output in real time to suit my needs. Motionbuilder is a great product but expensive for someone playing around with an idea and I’d still need one of those pricey 3D software’s to model and bone my characters.

Saturday morning cartoons rang from high quality 3d to rough 2d and still capture their audience very well. I think game engine output can be more than acceptable to create graphic story telling. If Blender’s game engine were just a little improved with better shadowing and maybe bump mapping I think it approaches Quake 3 in quality. At that point it has every thing you need to produce some great Machinima. Create your scene, animate, mix in sound , play it at high res. with AA on, capture with Fraps save it out of your video editor at a little smaller size to smooth it out a little more and BAM! Great looking on demand cartoons.

I think the game engine look is unique. Better than 2D but not that attempted photo real 3D. I think real time rendering has a place besides preview. With the new animation features coming in Blender, the one thing that kills regular Machinima, those short choppy animation cycles, will be over come.

I’ve only just started using Blender but I’ve ordered the 2.3 Guide and the Game Kit books. This is a great program and an excellent community. I hope the people who acutely know how to program Blender continue to improve its real time capabilities. Ultimately a button that just lets you render out to Blenders own game engine with out setting up blocks ( crazy maybe, but an artist can dream )!

[joeri]

...stuff...

Yes. Blender already has this.
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Blender_De ... 163.0.html
was made with the game engine.
Commandline options can set the game engine to 'don't skip frames.'
And python can save screen captures on frame change.
Modern video cards do AA without using highres display setting. But then again PAL is 720x576. So with a 1440x1280 display you'll get a 2x2 oversampling.

[hashman]

I'm waiting for my copy of the Game kit book to arrive, but is it that simple,
create and animte my scene and hit "P"? Instant Machinima? I don't need to set up logic blocks?

[numasan]

I'm pretty sure FX composer is DirectX only at the moment. ATI's RenderMonkey supports GLSL, and is quite good for developing shaders on Windows.

Even though I'm far from being a programmer, I follow the GPGPU and glSlang stuff with great interest. Here are some projects that might help:

http://www.typhoonlabs.com
OpenGL Shader Designer (Linux version on the way)

http://openvidia.sourceforge.net
Parallel GPU Computer Vision

http://www.jahshaka.org
Of course...

[joeri]

I'm waiting for my copy of the Game kit book to arrive, but is it that simple,
create and animte my scene and hit "P"? Instant Machinima? I don't need to set up logic blocks?

All moving game engine objects need logic bricks.
But Machinima is very very simple.
Connect an always sensor to a controller and an IPO actuator to that controller. Hit the child button on the actuator and all childeren will also animate. So you can parent all animated objects to an empty with this controller system and your done.

More tips on using the game engine can be found on blender user forums.
Check out http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Websites.7.0.html to find some good ones.

The web plugin has some nice examples of realtime movies.
http://www.blender3d.com/About/3dplugin ... egirlMovie
You'll need a plug-in compatible browser, or download the b file.
http://www.blender3d.com/_media/gallery ... ovie.blend