Monte Carlo* ray tracing, or path tracing. Sorry, couldn't resist, it's a little bit different thing...xsisupport wrote:and how it implements ray tracing
Maxwell / 3D Delight (Little bit of Arnold)- My Choice
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iamVFX
- Posts: 697
- Joined: 24 Sep 2010, 16:28
Re: Maxwell / 3D Delight (Little bit of Arnold)- My Choice
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andystopford
- Posts: 6
- Joined: 02 Aug 2012, 10:24
Re: Maxwell / 3D Delight (Little bit of Arnold)- My Choice
3Delight is certainly capable of photo-realism, though it wouldn't exactly be your first choice if you were doing arch-vis stuff; it has global illumination and IBL and they work pretty well, if rather slowly (though I'm just using the two-core free version. I should think if it was firing on all eight it might be a match for some of the ray-tracers, especially as it's far less prone to flickering and sparkling.).
Ray-tracing is much quicker than it used to be and the odd reflective/refractive object is no problem, though if you've got a scene with loads of glass and chrome mental ray is going to preferable. It's often better to use depth-mapped shadows, especially as the maps can be re-used, but it isn't essential.
Hair is no problem - it renders fast and a property of REYES renderers like 3DL is that motion blur doesn't increase render times, and can actually reduce them because the shading rate (which determines quality) automatically reduces[*] when the blur makes a precise solution pointless. Displacement and DOF are also essentially cost-free.
A common misconception is that anything renderman related is ultra-technical and requires advanced programming knowledge - not so; at least in its Softimage incarnation 3DL is about as near to one click rendering as you can get. Most of the time the most important control is the shading rate, and maybe the filter setting. And you can set the render region to display progressive rendering.
[*]Numerically higher, just to be confusing
Ray-tracing is much quicker than it used to be and the odd reflective/refractive object is no problem, though if you've got a scene with loads of glass and chrome mental ray is going to preferable. It's often better to use depth-mapped shadows, especially as the maps can be re-used, but it isn't essential.
Hair is no problem - it renders fast and a property of REYES renderers like 3DL is that motion blur doesn't increase render times, and can actually reduce them because the shading rate (which determines quality) automatically reduces[*] when the blur makes a precise solution pointless. Displacement and DOF are also essentially cost-free.
A common misconception is that anything renderman related is ultra-technical and requires advanced programming knowledge - not so; at least in its Softimage incarnation 3DL is about as near to one click rendering as you can get. Most of the time the most important control is the shading rate, and maybe the filter setting. And you can set the render region to display progressive rendering.
[*]Numerically higher, just to be confusing