Me too

They seemed to have really gained some momentum.

Just playing with Blender where you can easily switch between CPU and GPU and GPU is drastically faster for previewing. You're right it takes time to get rid of the noise which reduces it's usefulness for final renders but wow, is it nice when you're setting up a scene which to me is most useful. I don't care if it takes all night after that but just not while I'm sitting there!



True. But couldn't that concept be implemented in one render engine (MR)? Weta just happens to use Renderman but Nvidia helped develop PantaRay so they have the code and they own MR so...put the two together?

Accelerating area lights, or ao, with the gpu on existing renderers is not such a big deal because there is no actual shader evaluation in those cases. Since in theory anyone can write theire own mr shaders it is not pratical to run that through the gpu.

When you talk about mimicing the pantaray workflow, that goes in the complete oposite way of workig interactivly since there are many passes and all. The only actual reason for them to work in such a way is to use raytracing on really huge datasets... there is no reason for such a workflow on less demanding projects (read gazillion polygons).

Could this not be done internally/automatically as one pass though? Since there is no shader evaluation, why would this interfere with custom shaders?

All I know, is that calculating area lights eats up a LOT of time for me so it would be significant I think.

Just have to wait and see what happens I guess...

how many lights do you have in your scene? did you use falloffs? how many samples per light you use? are you using the physical light node with the treshold option? it accelerates the rendering alot in scenes with more lights. not as fast as with MIS but this will come in the next version.

I was talking more in general over a number of different projects but typically I use only 2 or 3 area lights, sometimes only 1. For the aviation projects I don't want any grain at all so I have to use fairly high samples per light, usually 5 or 6.

When possible I use Holger's very nice area light node which is significantly faster but if there are 2 or more lights sometimes I run into a bug where the shadows are black and blotchy where the two light shadows overlap.

I haven't tried the physical light node, thanks for the tip. I'll give that a try.

It's just an observation that there is a drastic hit in render time when area lights are activated so any improvement in that area would be most welcome.

wont help, as it still slow. the ONLY reason why they do it is because they have insane ammount of geometry


you mixed both of my answers:
1. there is no evaluation of shaders in ao and shadows
2. shader evaluation is (one of) the (propably impossible to overcome) bottlenecks in transfering MR to the GPU

With every development and support going to Maya and every other third party support not going into XSI, droppping from XSI or half implemeted in XSI, it is tempting for someone to finally move away from XSI. And the obvious next step is moving to Maya.
Thinking of this better though it might not be a good solution as well. Autodesk might buy a new software next year and move all the good stuff in their new baby and suddently Maya becomes another XSI in terms of development lagging back, just like Max is slowly doing. Then what? Oh well..move again I guess?
The thing is that people in the industry have to wake up (me included) and move not away from one software or another, but rather from AutoBot as a whole, to other healthier companies, bacause I recently feel like someone is grabbing me from my balls (greek phrase, but you got the point).
You know what, I hate this feeling and who wouldn't, so give me break or gracefully unplug yourself.

Reading Luceric comments I understood AD make plan for the next five years or more. For the next five years Maya is AD focus (with the mysterious maya FX project). What can buying now AD on the market? the only software they can buy is Cinema 4d and/or Lightwave, houdini is not for sale like Modo (either are private company). Anyone would like to leave Softimage for Cinema 4d or Lightwave under AD "development"? I trully think no...

So, I don't like it and I don't see so many happy users on maya front, but seems Maya is the winning horse and you can bet on it.

Ther is really no winning horse under Autodesk horse, my guess is in few years other softwares will compete fully with AD products where nowadays they might lack.
AD is doing the same mistake Mental Images did, sitting in their old glory while other software houses keep growing, untill they wake up one day and be like "oh shit.."

You just need SideFX to take a look into make modeling and rigging more accessible and flexible and AD is going to get smashed bad. Same goes for Cinema 4D.
And considering those 2 software houses, its a really plausible future.
Watch it.