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Pornucopia and the entropy of the benefits of Mental Ray
15 years ago
Note: tl;dr skim text is underlined
Mental Ray
For a very long time I've tried to learn working in a photorealistic renderer called Mental Ray. It offers such exciting techniques as sub-surface scattering, ambient occlusion and soft shadows. It felt like the next logical step, a whole different approach to rendering in 3D. I've got to the point where I'm fairly well versed in the techniques involved, but unfortunately a lack of hardware is yet again hindering me.
It started with horrendous excursions in different technologies for making fur and hair. This one wouldn't render reflections, that one didn't have the features, the next one didn't have the controls. And most of them wouldn't work in Mental Ray due to being atmospheric effects, which are unsupported. I ended up needing to switch to a 64 bit processor to generate the number of hairs in geometry so that they could be shaded.
One by one I schooled myself in how to use certain techniques, all the while working on a new character to test them out on. The render times climbing ever higher. I've just uploaded an image which took 2 hours and 51 minutes to render. This image has no shadows, no final gather, no global illumination, and no postprocessing. Adding all of that to a quality which is suitable would scale the production of a single image by a few more hours.
Adding on top of this is that the image has a resolution of HD 720p. I would like to create full HD images, which would be 1080p (a resolution of 1920x1080 to be precise). A luxury I wish I could afford is that of stereoscopic 3D - which doubles the number of frames that need rendering. At a framerate of 24 (a cinematic standard), I calculate that one single second of animation would take around 288 hours to render, or 12 days. A minute of animation would take 720 days or just under two years to render on a single, quad core render node. The shortest possible feature-length movie (40 minutes) would take almost 8 decades.
I can't render anything of quality with Mental Ray right now. I just don't have the money or hardware. I'm going to go back to scanline, and learn some workarounds (using translucency shader for SSS, creating a sky dome of lights for AO). The quality of my renders will hopefully be better than before, just not as good as I'd hoped I could do with Mental Ray.
Pornucopia
I've shared a vision with a few friends which I'd like to discuss now. Whilst creating the latest character, Brooke, I perfected a workflow which allows me to reuse some of the common data from one character in another. Some things such as geometric structures, rigging, mapping and morph targets can be carried on and this reduces the workload for new characters dramatically. I might be able to make new characters within a month or two instead of each taking several months. It feels a little bit of a cheat, but then again, there's no sense in reinventing the wheel, right?
For a long time I've felt stifled due to the time it takes to create characters. I feel as though the designing of this workflow will start a new age in my hobby, one in which I can express myself creatively. I want to have a number of character archetypes and components available. A sort of library of body parts that can be combined to make new characters. With it I can trade and do gifts for my friends freely.
Commission rates for new characters have dropped by 66% for the time being, though the service is closed due to stuff I'm doing for friends.
Mental Ray
For a very long time I've tried to learn working in a photorealistic renderer called Mental Ray. It offers such exciting techniques as sub-surface scattering, ambient occlusion and soft shadows. It felt like the next logical step, a whole different approach to rendering in 3D. I've got to the point where I'm fairly well versed in the techniques involved, but unfortunately a lack of hardware is yet again hindering me.
It started with horrendous excursions in different technologies for making fur and hair. This one wouldn't render reflections, that one didn't have the features, the next one didn't have the controls. And most of them wouldn't work in Mental Ray due to being atmospheric effects, which are unsupported. I ended up needing to switch to a 64 bit processor to generate the number of hairs in geometry so that they could be shaded.
One by one I schooled myself in how to use certain techniques, all the while working on a new character to test them out on. The render times climbing ever higher. I've just uploaded an image which took 2 hours and 51 minutes to render. This image has no shadows, no final gather, no global illumination, and no postprocessing. Adding all of that to a quality which is suitable would scale the production of a single image by a few more hours.
Adding on top of this is that the image has a resolution of HD 720p. I would like to create full HD images, which would be 1080p (a resolution of 1920x1080 to be precise). A luxury I wish I could afford is that of stereoscopic 3D - which doubles the number of frames that need rendering. At a framerate of 24 (a cinematic standard), I calculate that one single second of animation would take around 288 hours to render, or 12 days. A minute of animation would take 720 days or just under two years to render on a single, quad core render node. The shortest possible feature-length movie (40 minutes) would take almost 8 decades.
I can't render anything of quality with Mental Ray right now. I just don't have the money or hardware. I'm going to go back to scanline, and learn some workarounds (using translucency shader for SSS, creating a sky dome of lights for AO). The quality of my renders will hopefully be better than before, just not as good as I'd hoped I could do with Mental Ray.
Pornucopia
I've shared a vision with a few friends which I'd like to discuss now. Whilst creating the latest character, Brooke, I perfected a workflow which allows me to reuse some of the common data from one character in another. Some things such as geometric structures, rigging, mapping and morph targets can be carried on and this reduces the workload for new characters dramatically. I might be able to make new characters within a month or two instead of each taking several months. It feels a little bit of a cheat, but then again, there's no sense in reinventing the wheel, right?
For a long time I've felt stifled due to the time it takes to create characters. I feel as though the designing of this workflow will start a new age in my hobby, one in which I can express myself creatively. I want to have a number of character archetypes and components available. A sort of library of body parts that can be combined to make new characters. With it I can trade and do gifts for my friends freely.
Commission rates for new characters have dropped by 66% for the time being, though the service is closed due to stuff I'm doing for friends.
Question....
Doesn't Metal Ray support graphics card acceleration of image processing?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0udMBdo0Rac
I think I found it. Take a look
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFiWWnO3o2w
Skip ahead to about 10.30 through 13.30
They were using an "I-Ray" renderer with a quadro and a tesla. Render time went to about 30 seconds.
Still, it appears to cut real render time down from hours to minutes, which is a HUGE difference. Especially considering they were comparing against dual quad core intels with hyperthreading.
The other thing they have later in the video shows them rendering scenes from a cloud computing source via a browser in near real-time. That would I *think* be a lower cost option, but have no idea what the service would run.
It really, truly is amazing. I hope to soon have some cash rolling in, and I'll revisit mr in general. The future looks bright if you've got cash in hand!
*heh* If you really wanna make your E-peen hard, take a look at http://media.bestofmicro.com/super-.....-150951-13.jpg
If our friend "moores law" keeps holding true, it's possible - (tho' still unlikely) something like this could drop enough in price to be available to the general public in 10-15 years.
But it has a nice golden phallic form factor right now.