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Colimo - Realtime Post Process Render Editing

27

Colimo is a tool for making real-time changes to final renders from Thea render, using a Blender-Thea-Colimo pipeline. It sports some really impressive feature, such as the ability to change colours and textures of objects, and have not only the objects themselves update in real time, but any GI reflections, glossy reflections and refractions update too.

http://vimeo.com/8634980

Thea Renderer user will be able to use Colimo with the soon to be released Thea Render 1.1.

Links

27 Comments

  1. Very good for shortening production/rendering times for product (and other) visualizations. I haven´t tested Thea, but these days I´m very reluctant to go with anything that doesn´t come with the power of GPU - and having browsed quickly the Thea site I haven´t seen anything about GPU at all. Perhaps anyone else knows more?

  2. I did this a couple of years ago with Lightwave3D and DigitalFusion. LW rendered into a file format (not quite sure about the name but it was widely available) that had several extra channels (like depth buffer, uv-info, gi, refractionvalues, object-ids, textures, etc.) that were accessible through digital fusion. The only thing you could not do was change geometry. Because of the depth info you could add fog, etc. It was such a great timesaver but produced really huge amount of data for each image. Motivo CG looks great. But with the right file format this should not be restricted to Thea output.

  3. I posted this story to BlenderNation.
    I guess I wasn't signed in when I did it, because my name didn't appear with it.

    I hope you all recognize how amazing this is.
    I bought Thea Render last year and have been very happy with it.
    They just optimized the unbiased engine for a huge speed increase.
    Now, they are releasing 1.1 with this bridge to Colimo.
    For those who want GPU rendering, Thea Render will also have this. They are currently working on it.
    For those who aren't familiar with Thea, it also has a biased rendering engine, that is fast, clean, and very suitable for animation.

    Maybe it will be possible, down the road, once Cycles is more mature, for someone to write an exporter to go straight from Blender to Colimo.

    Until then, this pipeline is a great option.

  4. I took a closer look at the current options we have. I found the info that Blender is able to render to OpenExr - a multilayer file format including additional channels like depth, alpha, etc. Have a look here: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/imaging/ Back then there was no Editing support for OpenExr. But doing a search I found this: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a9d3c597-7bd8a.html and this: http://www.fnordware.com/ProEXR/.

    The (untested) workflow could be: render with blender with the needed channels in openexr format, get the image sequence into AE to do your magic. Also edit the openexr files in Photoshop!

    Maybe Colimo will support OpenEXR anytime. That would be great!

  5. €295.00 and €29.50 for plugin?? Not sure if you need to buy both but i'm guessing yes. Im not making money from 3D modeling so I think I'll go with the free ways:) Cool stuff though.

  6. oh it says "Requires an application license.". It should really come with the plugin when paying that much but hey gotta make there money:)

  7. I have purchased Thea render some months ago, because I encounter too often exporting/importing troubles with Indigo for big scenes, due to Blender sometimes creating materials that are not affected to faces and can't be deleted.Faulty objects seems impossible to find in a huge project. So I purchased Thea, because it has an exporter for Blender, and I have to say that I didn't encounter troubles at exporting/importing my "defective" big scenes. This said, Thea seems slow in unbiaised mode,and I don't really like the results. It is also more complex (more features to learn when you only need to render) and more difficult to use than Indigo imho.
    To tell it short, I bought a software that I almost don't use.

  8. Roubal,

    Thea is so easy to use I really do not know why you describe it as complicated.
    The material system is very logical, the scene design is simple, and the render module
    follows typical CG terms.

    Which version of Indigo are you using cause Indigo has also GPU which Thea does not have yet.

  9. Guys,

    Colimo will work with any renderer. Take a look at their manual workflow:

    http://vimeo.com/10031720

    All you need to do is render a normai pass for your scene and a render with a 50% grey material
    and a black material on each object you want to dynamically edit in Colimo. These should be
    *separate* EXR images.

    They aren't using multiple layers in EXR -- they just need it for 32bit floating point precision.

  10. @daas : Well, I use a recent version of Indigo, I can't tell you the number, because I'm not on my workstation right now.

    For Thea, to be honest, I have not had enough time to learn it in depth : I needed it in a context with a short deadline, and I gave up because I had not enough time to learn it. Finally I came back to Octane. It doesn't offer so many possibilities yet (no volumetrics no SSS), but the exporter works fine and setting materials is really fast. As I like having several tools in my box, I will give an other chance to Thea when I'll have more time, for sure, but the first impression hasn't been what I expected.

  11. Looks like it will be very interesting... once it overcomes it's dependencies and comes to Linux! ;)

    Realistically though, I think we're more likely to see features like this eventually added to Cycles before that happens. I'd donate for it...

  12. With regard to GPU rendering. It is a fad that has no objective basis in reality. CPU rendering is far superior and in many scenes even faster than GPUs. The GPU is limited in memory and textures so sure, a GPU can render your toy test scene just fine but it cannot render a giga poly scene with referenced items and gigabytes of textures. An optimized CPU renderer can be as fast as or faster than a GPU. A GPU renderer might be useful for previewing your render but it simply cannot replace a full robust production renderer.

  13. The Techno Alien on

    I am using Ubuntu 11.04 64 bits and Blender 2.59 r39404.
    I executed the install-x64.sh file from the TheaRender folder, now I can acces the stanalone renderer with an icon on the desktop or via Terminal, but I want to have it in Blender.
    I did this:

    sudo cp render_thea.zip /usr/shara/blender/2.59/scripts/addons

    (nothing happened, so I did the second sugesstion)

    sudo cp -r render_thea /usr/shara/blender/2.59/scripts/addons

    And now I have a render_thea folder in the addons, but it has an X icon in the folder, and it says it is unreadable. What am I doing wrong here, can someone help me, please?

  14. noen

    with all your GPU vs CPU comparison you seem to fail to see the area this tool fits in,
    what it is and what it is not.

    I know of two other 10k realtime render solutions which give you GPU based results.
    But they are not meant to do things 3DMax could do but can do what some designers
    do much faster than 3DMax.

    Specifically when the client is sitting next to you.

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