davpe

i've seen this a few times already. not sure what it is or if it's the same thing but for me it helped to disable adaptive sampling.

hmm, it certainly doesn't render right and there seem to be no way to fix it. haven't noticed it ever before to be honest (not even sure if it's always been like this). you should ask sidefx. I would consider it a bug. cheers. btw. in chrome ball reflections, i guess you're getting the same error, you just can't see it for the environment is rendered in much smaller area and the pixel coverage is much higher.

not sure what I should be looking at at the picture. chrome balls look fine to me. is it the ground rendering wrong? personally I haven't noticed any issue of this kind sharp reflection always gives me sharp reflection... what kind of shader are you using? can you post a scene?

1. because it's a bug I think 2. i assume that's because you have left "Disable lighting and emission" on bake ROP turned on (which is on by default for some reason)

hm, with arnold you'll have to unpack and split the alembic file into individual geometries to be able to use it with instance object. bummer .-/

hi, find the example scene attached. i just created a random integer attribute (with maximum at packed alembics count in your file) that was identifying a packed point not to be deleted at that particular template point. while instancing packed alembics works i experienced weird scene refresh issues which made it seem not to work. i'm unsure whether that is an issue of the particular build i'm using or something else. anyways, just be aware this may be working oddly (looks like a bug to me). btw. your bblock_pos.abc contained 0 points so i used a grid for the template. cheers. instance packed abc.hiplc

hi, this video explains how to use instancing with for-loops https://vimeo.com/251729016

hi, not sure what the issue is in your scene, here you go is a working example anyways. cheers. cube_bakeao.hiplc

i dunno, maybe it's because nuke is so easy to learn so you can manage in a few days while actually using it at work? no need for something that tries to mimic it for learning purposes (i mean, if you've never seen a compositor before then it's probably useful). if you are freelancing you will do better with Fusion, which is for free too and has definitely more mature toolset. besides, if you're actually making money with it, having a free software may not be the most important thing to you. people will have different opinions, however this is what makes sense to mee. still it is good that Natron exists and trying to create a competitive environment of some sort. maybe in a few years... who knows...

hi, i'm afraid you'll always get that unwanted deformation. i was trying to achieve something similar to what are you doing and came to a conclusion there always gonna be stretching in gradients (althou can't explain why exactly is it happening). i'd be very happy to be wrong thou!

hey, good summary however, i haven't found copy to points instancing to perform worse than original instance object (it is mostly a workflow difference more than anything else). it should definitely be able to handle any instancing scenario. if you see a performance hit even with hundreds of copies you are definitely doing something wrong, or you do much more data handling than with instance object. cheers.

heh, that's a bummer... i would probably just ask sidefx what they think you should do about it. i haven't ever seen this message (and hope i never will ), my last windows update went a week ago or so and i'm on 16.5.378.

this is what i get when i load the scene and hit render. photon map generation can take a while thou so you may need to wait (or make your photon count and filter/prefilter samples fewer). actually i haven't changed any significant settings in your scene. my guess is it was just a path to the photon file on one of your lights that made it fail. regarding suggested workflow, you can achieve photorealism by any available method, it is more a question of a way of getting there more than whether you can get there. photon maps actually is something i wouldn't discourage you from using, and particularly for interior scenes it may perform better than other illumination methods. but it's a bit dated in terms of workflow and it is somewhat more complicated to set up properly (images may appear fuzzy or may have nasty artifacts). most renders you see today are computed by pathtracing, which is an unbiased method for light transport used by most contemporary CPU renderers, including Mantra and Arnold. its' accuracy is superb and it is really easy to use, on the other hand, pathtracing is generally slower than photon maps and images may show unwanted noise, especially in scenes that are mostly illuminated by indirect light (typical for interiors or evening/night lighting). effects like caustics for example are very expensive to render with pathtracing. both methods have it's pluses and minuses and it's up to you to consider which one is right for your needs. hope that helps. cheers.

python is a way to go for such things...

hi, your setup is not working. you were getting no light bounce from gi lights. the reason why the picture had more light in it when you turned gi lights off, was because light bounce was computed by pathtracer which is a default "global illumination" solution in mantra. pathtracer is disabled once you turn on gi light, and bounces are computed by photon maps. photon maps are sort of an old school approach by the way... check the attachment for fixed scene. cheers. gilight working.hipnc