Volcano-Studios is experimenting with combining different rendering technologies like OpenGL, Blender Internal and Cycles. The result: impressive image quality and very fast rendering.
Elad Barness writes:
Hello everyone, we in Volcano-Studios came up with an idea of developing a fusion render that combines blender internal/openGL render and cycles render together.
We made a technical demo (no creative thinking here just technical):
The idea is to take the fast passes from each render and combine the passes together.
For example the reflection pass in cycles is really fast so we used it here, on the other hand, shadows, AO, and shading are taken from both opengl and cycles together.
This render takes a few seconds per frame to render. We are still developing the idea to make the result better and the workflow faster.
We are developing a mini site for this development, which will be available from our site in a few weeks (volcano-s.com), I want to prepare a full tutorial on how anyone can do in Blender very easily (if there will be a demand for it) and of course to share codes when available that will render the passes automatically and create compositing nodes of the connections.
A previous version of the idea:
Here we used only OpenGL render with fake reflections.
We would like to thank Neubi and BlendSwap for the excellent models and animation!
We hope you like the idea, would love to hear comments!
Best regards,
Elad
27 Comments
impressive
Great idea thanks.
oO awesome... and really interesting !! Can't wait to check this out !
super bueno! se ve genial,
This sounds really cool guys. I wonder if this could eventually become an actual part of Blender, becoming something like a "preview render" option, replacing OpenGL in the ui. There could be some options to disable passes to speed it up for super complex stuff.
Trunk!
It's like I always say: Sometimes, the best option is options.
As long as a good option is stable and retains some advantage, it's useful to some means. It's nice to see examples of utilizing the various advantages of the different rendering options together. Nice results. And I for one would be interested in seeing a bit of your workflow.
I agree, the path tracing reflecion is fast, however for me I feel like my whole cpu is in usage during the process so I think opengl rendering are better in some situations.
OMG, make it happen
Very nice, I'm definitely looking forward to future info.
That is really impressive!
As a hobbyist who kills for improved render time, I think I just messed my pants. Twice.
This*is*awesome!! Especially if it was available interactively in the viewport. Would that be doable with your method?
We use Blender commercially for one specific process in car development (of a well known brand...). Such fast (close to real time) and realistic rendering, especially interactively in the viewport, would be very interesting, even allow us to use Blender more extensively.
but that's not real time no ? that's a final rendered animation right ? where is the cycles/blender video ?
Correct - each frame takes a few seconds to render, I've updated the title.
As they say, more information will follow.
If there were no passes combinations it was about realtime an heavy opengl render.
We used passes from each render, so its not a final render of each combination but passes combination.
We will do our best to upload assets and tutorials soon.
Thanks :)
I would like to thank all of you for the great comments!
We are excited as you are!
For now we do it manually without writing any big script,
We would like to make a few more test and then we will aim on putting everything together into a script that will save a lot of time in making the scene ready for render.
In the next few weeks we will publish a mini site with a short tutorial on how we do it for now.
Have a great day,
Elad
Volcano-s.com
Would it be indiscreet to enquire about the nature of your work which may requires such finesses and speed? I myself would gladly shorten my rendering times if it still meant that I'd get satisfactory quality for a quick presentation to a client.
I am grateful to you all for sharing this with us.
I will release some material soon about how we do it technically.
As for the theory,I got most of my ideas from cfwin and blendercookie just took all of their ideas and put them together:
opengl:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW4PgpVmHlk&list=TLacnenbr1rzPObQ63X8lEYmqkPa454G_w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quc3Qq2rWCA&list=TLNM2FTl0K0brQRiicWEL2NzutJHmsDlBW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckHwD6V6gIM
render passes (i mostly use it for reflections and AO) and noise reduction (if needed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTE4r_yGwc8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE7kh5WdE3k&list=UU9VayT7q3pQ7tdF-TG4Q0yQ
another great tool, which a great friend of mine, tamir lousky, made is the fake hdr lighting from hdri tool for blender render i use it sometimes for global illumination:
http://bioblog3d.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/fake-hdr-teaser/
The idea is to understand every projetct and then to render the right passes from each renderer.
My idea is to take all these great ideas and combine them together into a script that will automatically render all the passes you need together.
Cheers!
besides having a faster good looking (or even medium) looking render is great, for movies, getting them done in a reasonable time, i also like that it would consume less of the electric grid.
All render speed improvements, result in a "greener" less power hungry application, i like that too.
totally awesome, i was wondering why nobody did it before, every project i try to mix up what works faster from each renderer, but making a whole solution out of it is stunning, great job guys, i'm first in line to try out :D
As others have already said, this looks awesome! It will be extremely helpful for quick renders and acceptable results:) I've been wishing for something close to "element 3d" level results in Blender especially for 3d that's not necessarily front and center. Can't wait for the tuts!
.. thanks for your work, and as you mentioned, to Cfwin for his experimentation with opengl renders.
As soon as all the external renderers are tied in as well(Mitsuba, Yafa, Lux, etc), I think that Blender could end up being one of the best options available for high quality, diverse looking, fast renders. This is all very exciting. Hopefully this will have official BF support ASAP.
Thank you again for all the great comments.
As for now we are already thinking of the next step.
The idea isn't really the "REAL TIME" but the fastest for each project.
Obviously real-time is the best but sometimes, with the current computing systems it isn't possible.
We wanted to do the first test with a car because car commecrials are well knows as expensive and slow rendered.
We are nw checking also SSS fast solutions, SSAO (if possible) and other things each of us work with and have to spend hours in rendering them.
As in after-effects great plug-in by andrew Kramer "Element 3D" some options aren't really real-time while others are.
For now we aim on the needs, after that we will start with coding it into a user friendly "check-boxes" script that will create a composition with all the passes that are checked for the right objects.
Have a great weekend/week :)
The following video shows how something like this can be done. It was posted on CGCookie a while back. Maybe someone here will find it useful. This was before Cycles had volumetrics so it uses BI for the smoke.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/10/10/compositing-smoke-simulations-cycles-renders/
Can this run in the game engine :D That would be amazing
Line 1: "combining different rendering technologies like OpenGL, Blender Internal and Cycles."
So no, sorry.