andy moorer » realtime

Fury Particle Renderer gets Furious-er

andy — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:07:18 +0000

As long as we are talking about Exocortex, they just posted this exciting preview of the next version of their point rendering tool Fury.

For those of you wondering why this is important, it’s simple enough. Fury is fast. Really, really fast. And it was written by Ben Houston, the original author of Krakatoa, a tool of choice for rendering particles. Softimage, Max and Maya users alike can move their simulations to ICE (or create their simulations with ice directly) and partake in the Fury awesomeness.

LOOK at it. 1 million points. Self shadowing and cast shadows. 1-second-per-frame.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“The major new features in Fury 2.0:

* GPU-accelerated particle self-shadowing
* Shadow maps
* Built-in compositing previewing.
* Command line renderer support.
* Synchronized Softimage and Maya support.

In this example, 1 million points are lit and rendered in about 1 second per frame and the shadow map is also created at the same time. Motion blur and DOF do not slow down rendering time.

The simulation in this example is from a alpha-version of SlipstreamVX 2.0 and thus the smoke motion isn’t quite perfect in this video.”

Mental Mill and Softimage

andy — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:29:01 +0000

If you are already an experienced shader writer, Mental Mill doesn’t have much to offer, auto-generated code won’t appeal. But for TDs who haven’t the experience or time needed to get a shader going, it’s a huge boon. It’s also a way to get a feel for shader code, letting you experiment and see how the code changes as a concept is changed.

Here’s the mental mill blog, with some info for softimage users.

What’s important for everyone to know about Mental Mill is that the same “tree” can be used to generate code for multiple rendering types – with a few caveats, you can create a shader for Mental Ray, a matching realtime shader, and a renderman compliant shader all in one go (ummm, Arnold? Oh well). For softimage users, this can give you custom solutions you can see in both the viewport and at render time. Here’s a video which covers creation of a realtime shader, for instance…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mach Studio 2 review

andy — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:53:36 +0000

http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/02/01/review-machstudio-pro-2-the-future-of-rendering/1/

A 3D World review I wrote a while back of the (now free) Mach Studio Pro v2, which I have also written about on this blog, is now online. – AM

MS Pro 2.0 – Free?

andy — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:36:43 +0000

StudioGPU’s realtime renderer Mach Studio Version 2 is now available as a free download, with exporters for Max, Maya and Softimage. Hopefully this reflects a change in marketing strategy and not a discontinuation of development, as the product was beginning to mature nicely… but either way it’s a powerful tool at a great price, well worth the download. My little tests on this blog have barely scratched the surface of this renderer. It’s not a replacement for all rendering, but if you need blazingly fast render times measured in seconds and minutes instead of hours and days, while maintaining a certain basic quality (which with skill can rival mental ray and arnold), it’s the only game in town.

Render time per frame at 2k resolution, 0.1 seconds.

Screen capture

Fractal Explorer

andy — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:22:24 +0000

What an amazing web application. Exploring 3d fractal solids in realtime, it’s nuts. Fractal Explorer

RTlight

andy — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:26:28 +0000

A while back I made a few compounds in ICE to light pointclouds, but am still not satisfied. There is a tradeoff between physical accuracy and speed, and I’ve been hunting for the best of both worlds. My latest approach, used in a compound I’m calling RTlight, is by far the fastest I’ve made while still being “true” enough to be useful in a production situation. Here are a couple of tests:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some images

andy — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:38:01 +0000

I have a backlog of unseen work- tests, art, screenshots – which I’ve not posted because I’ve been super busy. Work for the studio, the green lantern film as well as other projects, articles for 3dWorld magazine, continuing work on an ICE terrain generation system, etc, etc. But here are a few images I have handy…

MSP vehicle render

msPro realtime test

Slipstream VX

andy — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:18:46 +0000

http://www.exocortex.com/simulation I’m not sure how long ago it happened, but the exocortex high-speed smoke tool “slipstreamVX” is now available, and at around $400 isn’t cheap but not as pricey as I would have expected either, particularly not for the kind of results it delivers and in an extensible, ICE-friendly manner.

Click here to view the embedded video.

MSpro from XSI

andy — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:51:06 +0000

Models in .obj format into XSI, then to MSpro for materials, lighting and a 5k render. The sculpture mesh is a full res scan, about as thick as a zbrush export with several hundred thousand polys.

Screen capture

More realtime test renders

andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:31:39 +0000

Since I’ve been putting MSpro through it’s paces today, I decided to see how it did with a larger data set. So I fed it a reasonably large model of Manhattan. Mach Studio did great, export/import was fast, the machine was responsive, and even hitting it with realtime ambient occlusion, shadows and depth of field didn’t get the scene to a point where it chugged. Rendering this scene with similar settings in Mental Ray would have meant significant time per frame, certainly enough to preclude much in the way of any kind of immediate feedback. MSpro was fine onscreen and rendering 5k resolution images with settings turned up relatively high resulted in render times still under a half second a frame.

Not high art, but we’re talking test images people. I rather enjoy the simcity look of the orthographic one…Hey it looks like I nudged the ground mesh in one of those images. That would be a serious drag with a traditional render process, you’d have to submit it to the farm again. Realtime, it’s no big deal. Of course, there’s a lot of room for improvements on these images… the majority are not issues with the renderer but the artist (errr, me) who for some reason didn’t want to spend all night obsessing over test images. You can speed up render times, but there’s still tweaking galore. But at least you can tweak interactively.