Interactive Rendering

[Robert]

God!

How long I have to suffer till it is released???

Love it!!!

[paulison]

paulison did u check this already?

Hey, thanks for the link. I didn't notice that thread before but i've seen the teapot vid through workmates.

Which leaves me wondering exactly the same things as i asked in my post before about speed. Will i need 100 renderfarm machines in order to make the realtime preview work on a massive scene?. Everything sounds great when considering a few teapots but i'm trying to think ahead to the practicality of it for actual projects. If its entirely CPU based calculations then its going to need a lot of power right?. Is it true that GPU based calcutions arnt preferred due to colour variations between machines?. I think that an ideal solution would be a combination of CPU for some things and GPU for other things would be ideal but thats just my uneducated opinion!. It is just a "preview" afterall so in that case speed > perfection

very interesting to see how things develop!

[vlado]

It keeps quite interactive for scenes with 2 million triangles and less powerful machines. The main considerations are what resolution you are going to preview at (doubling the resolution needs four times as much power to get the same update speed) and how fast the noise will clear for the particular scene configuration.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Robert]

The best thing in it is the preview of reflections (blurry and none) as well as HDRI...
I spend so much time in test render, an interactive tools would save me hours...
Hope it won't be long...
If you need testers, here is one who really depend on the tool!

[trick]

One thing that would be really convenient (as is with FPrime for Lightwave) is the ability to interactively zoom the viewport, so you can tune fine details...without changing the camera itself of course !!! I know you can set up a perspective viewport but it take a lot more clicks and navigation and kills your camera perspective !!!

[Thox]

OMG, I just seen the new videos of the interactive preview render, simply amazing. I only have question.

WHEN?

Really looking forward to this.

Thox

[sv]

vlado, i don't ever use Activeshade so appologies if this isn't possible, but are there any plans for a sort of 'animation' mode for this - for example what happens if you press play in the viewport, could you scrub through a series of frames?

It'd be a good system if you could incorporate some sort of caching of each frame in the timeline, so you could quickly preview simple animations. Perhaps something like preview animation mode which renders out to a specified file for each frame in the timeline, but perhaps doing something like 1 second of PPT as shown per frame.....?

An example would be:
we do quite a lot of simple product animations, for instance a mobile phone. We can animate the object, and press play and watch the viewport animation run at 25fps. The most amount of time is spent rendering sample animations to see how the light works - often from a static view the lighting is great, but as the object rotates you get a big ugly reflection of a Vraylight, so we move it, re-render, see what it looks like etc. If this could be done, however crudely, in realtime, or around 12 - 25fps it would save so so so so so so so so much time!

Just wondering?

[^Lele^]

If the implementation's done right, I'm sure something like that could be well scripted.
Ie.: render a 1second ppt, grab the FB, save to disk, and render the next frame until the animation range end.
Once finished, load the saved images in the ram player.

[vlado]

Currently this works only for camera animations - if you play the animation in the viewport, the ActiveShade window follows it; it will be extended to other animation types as well (although if the scene is large, rebuilding it may take time).

Best regards,
Vlado

[sv]

perfect! Any sample clips of this yet to wet our appetites?

good work guys, can't wait....

[dcullipher]

Any chance that even a beta version of this will be included with SP2?

My artists are drooling on their keyboards watching the sample videos and its getting expensive to replace them.

If not I will have to invest in the waterproof keyboards

[vlado]

This will not be included in SP2 as it is still in alpha stage (e.g unstable and feature-incomplete). There is a limited round of alpha testing going on and you can email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com for more info.

Best regards,
Vlado

[devin]

Vlado, can you give us some idea about ideal system requirements? I was going to buy a new system but I'm going to hold off until this program comes out so I can customize my system to work best with it. I've also got 20 DR machines that I can upgrade at the same time so I can get maximum performance out of the interactive rendering system.

[vlado]

Well, the ideal would be as fast as you can get it This means more cores and faster RAM (RAM speed is more important than actual processor speed).

To use DR efficiently you'll need a gigabit network, otherwise the machines will sit and wait for the network.

Best regards,
Vlado

[devin]

I've got a 1gigabit network setup but if it would make things faster we could upgrade that as well, would it be worth it?