Blender 2.61 with HOT

[LEO-oo-]

Blender's ocean simulation tools take the form of a modifier, to simulate and generate a deforming ocean surface, and associated texture, used to render the simulation data. Ported from the open source Houdini Ocean Toolkit, it is intended to simulate deep ocean waves and foam.

Link: Blender - Ocean Simulation

Link: Blender 2.61 - new features

[dulo]

Would be nice if SideFX could natively integrate HOT in H12 ..

[Andz]

I haven't had the chance to try HOT in Blender yet, but I ran some test with the new rendering engine and for photorealistic renderings I have been having some great results. But it is still in early stages.

[LEO-oo-]

@Andz - cool pictures! Thanks for sharing!

[kubabuk]

I ran some test with the new rendering engine and for photorealistic renderings I have been having some great results. But it is still in early stages.

Hey Andz, which engine did you use, cycles?

How about the render times?

Cool!

Edited December 15, 2011 by kubabuk

[Andz]

Hey Andz, which engine did you use, cycles?

How about the render times?

Cool!

Yes, I used cycles but I'm still learning it. From what I know, for now Cycles is just there to "represent" a new rendering integration, that is, the nodes setup for shader creation, etc. will be useful for any rendering engine implementation. So lets say, if someone does a renderman integration for blender, it will benefit from these new nodes setup for making renderman shaders. So Cycles started up as a proof of concept renderer for these tools, and according to coders, a pathtracer is a relatively simple renderer for a start up and that is why it lacks for now so many features (render passes, motion blur, ...). Since blender's internal renderer is in need of a major overhaul, Cycles will get developed further to substitute the rendering engine one day.

Speed is not the best compared to a scanline or raytracer, but I got decent results in these two images on a modest computer. They were rendered in a core2duo in about 1 hour each, at 1080p. But I just left these processing while I went out for lunch, so maybe they could be stoped before that. I can get about 10x faster results using the GPU, but it gets limited to the GPU's RAM. So the first image (footstool) wouldn't fit in the GPU's ram (gforce 9800gt) due to its geometry complexity. My first intention with that was more to test some organic modeling, so I really didn't care about any optimization.

Speed can vary a lot depending on you scene. Things that can make rendering time go up a lot in a pathtracer are small lighsources. So indoor scenes, small recessed light sources, caustics causing objets are the ones that take up most of the time to clean up. While some scenes that would take raytracers to a crawl is surprisingly responsive in actual viewport rendering, extreme DOF being one of them.

[Fabiano Berlim]

I started my career with Blender back in 2006. I'm not using it in regular basis. But is amazing to see how much it improves in no time.

The greatest thing about cycle is not even render time. But it's IPR way of working. Cycles give fair enough detailed image in no time. So you can make shaders and lighting pretty quickly.