sebkaine Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) I have relunch a render with your advise dennis, it's in fact faster and i am now very close from Arnold here are my settings - full PBR with portal (no photon map) - pixel sample : 8*8 - min sample : 2 - max sample : 8 - noise level : 0.008 - limite diffuse : 2 - limit reflection : 2 - min reflect ratio : 1 - env light sampling quality : 2 i think that when you have perfectly undertsand how noise can be control in Mantra you have a make a big step ... Edited March 5, 2015 by sebkaine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dennis.albus Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) Glad that its working out. You have to keep in mind though that the default mantra shader you are using has a glossy reflection component while Maxwell and Arnold seem to be diffuse only. This is obviously putting mantra at a disadvantage. EDIT: I just recalled that you wrote you are using the GGX shaders. These are indeed noisier than Houdinis builtin shading models. Edited March 5, 2015 by dennis.albus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) Ok now with clarisse ifx 1.6 PLE. it's a first test so i guess it could be optimised ... i had a lot of difficulty to get rid of the noise in full path tracing , with occlusion light it's fast , but with only path tracing i had to go very high in the light sampling, i think i am doing thing wrong here but ... here are the Settings 720p => 40 min - gi_monte_carlo - affect diffuse only - no occlusion lighting - light samplig quality : 32 - max bounce : 2 - raytracer anti aliasing : 8 i must confess that this first experience with clarisse wasn't that impressive - you lost the nodal tree organisation to use a sort of very good outliner - you lost the ROP tree organisation for a layering system - the interactive preview is very efficient but houdini IPR while not as good is still relevant well either from - flexibility - quality - speed - organisation of the workflow with geo / pass i find that Houdini has a lot to offer , the big cons is that all this greatness is sort of hidden behind a pretty confuse - mantra shader - mantra rop in this regards Arnold / Maxwell with their minimalist approach are absolutely great , you have what you need and just what you need no more ... no less. and i would say that maxwell BSDF layering system is my favorite one. it has the good part of the pixar slim delux + simplicity of arnold + stellar / unbreakable quality of the material. Switching mantra to a BSDF layering system instead of this monolithic mantra material could be an option ? Edited March 5, 2015 by sebkaine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 So what's up with Vray kicking butt then? Is it the king of indirect interiors? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 honestly 1080p with very acceptable lighting in 14min ... apart RedShift i can't imagine a competitor to V-Ray ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jon3de Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 Very interesting thread! The last weeks I started to dive into houdini in my freetime after some years of max and vray....vray is very fast with irr/lightcache combi but shouldn´t it be compared to the brute force/brute force method in Vray in this case? For stills it´s no problem but an animation with the vray settings above would cause a lot of flickering...at least for moving objects. Please correct me if Im wrong. king regards Jon 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 I do want to also note here that in previous testing, on the same machine, Mantra on OsX is ~25% more inefficient than Linux. That's one frame in every four! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) I couldn't resist to throw the stuff in RedShift 1080P => 18min My card is a poor Ge force 660, so i'm quite sure that on a proper GPU like a 970 redshift beat V-Ray. The quality is very good imo ... definitly a futur Rock Star ! and probably one of the fastest engine on the market ? Edited March 5, 2015 by sebkaine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rayman Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 For stills it´s no problem but an animation with the vray settings above would cause a lot of flickering...at least for moving objects. Please correct me if Im wrong. Yes, irr map/lc is not the best combination for scenes with a lot of moving objects, but there are several workarounds which makes it more efficient than the brute force method. That is the reason why it is the best choice for arch-viz - very easy to setup and super fast. 1080P => 18min My card is a poor Ge force 660, so i'm quite sure that on a proper GPU like a 970 redshift beat V-Ray. Well, there is a v-ray RT version that runs on CPU/OpenCL/CUDA , so check it if you have a chance. Have fun! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) 3Delight with it's killer path-tracer. Free license now goes to 8-cores, up from 6 It's meant to work in Houdini but we need some shaders written I'm thinking. HD 1920x1080 - 21min extrapolated out to 12 cores, (33min actual to the limit of 8 cores) on 2 x 3.33 Xeon 6 core. * warning * 25 min experienced operator Link to full res... https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhxek3vr1kb2gkf/3Delight2.png?dl=0 Edited March 5, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 Cycles in Blender 2.73a OsX - tried the Gtx980 but failed. CPU; 17mins and 128mins - for some reason the outlines were added... *warning 10 min experience with Cycles * Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mzigaib Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 (edited) Here it is my contribution: 1080 => 50 min render time on a 3GHZ quad core pixel samples 3X3 min samples = 4 max samples = 32 noise level = 0.001 PBR + Portal light (4 sample quality) with a (low res convolved HDR map) + Photon Map (filter samples 10/prefilter samples 500/distance threshold = 1) I am not sure if you really need to bump up the filter so high. Similar to the previous images and less than 1hr render time, I think I would not have problems with flickering noise in a animation maybe a little bit on the aliasing, I've seen worse that would get away in a shot but I would have to see sequence render to be sure, decreasing pixel samples really helped to reduce render time a bit and I think that using a lower resolution convolved hdr map, which I did inside Houdini, also helped. I still think there's room for optimization maybe get a little more alias definition without increasing to much render time, a 12 core machine would definitely help and also would be nice to use real shaders to see how much render time would really change. I know it's a little bit off topic but I think that worth to mention that mantra has a built in network render where you can add machines to help render your frame locally, it's really great for look dev even more if you have a farm, you can have 10-20 machines rendering your frame at the same time in the renderview! your workflow for interactive look dev would definitely change, one more option that you can get from Mantra. I'll post more if I have more meaningful updates. Cheers! Update: My image was reduced automatically I don't know how to post the full image. Edited March 6, 2015 by Mzigaib 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 6, 2015 Author Share Posted March 6, 2015 (edited) @Jonathan => good point for the flicking that's why we now use maxwell instead of vray in my previous company. it's slow but if you have a big farm you know that you will have - no flicking - stellar quality But i still consider V-Ray one of the best engine of the markett with the biggest scope in possibility for rendering algorithm. I hope it will arrive sooner or later in H. @Pavel => Thx i'm gonna check this @Marty => I always love 3Delight when i was working on Maya it was my renderer of choice. it suffer for a long time of the same problem mantra has. Great beautiful engine / Average awkward interface with the user ... @Michel Thanks for the tips i think that the arnold logic of 4 / 8 / 12 could be apply to mantra also - 4*4 if you have still frame and then you go higher in max samples - 8*8 for moving stills and then you will limit your max samples - 12*12 if you have fur / dof / hard motion blur Well it's an oversimplification but i think it's pretty true I also note in most engine i have test that pushing the light quality pretty high and keeping pixel sampling as low as possible is a good practice. Nice tips for the blurred and low res hdr i forgot to do that .. I would be curious to get your pov about this. Few month ago i have done a very short prototype as a request feature for maxwell plugin. It haven't been use at the end. So i would be curious to know if this kind a BSDF layering logic looks cool to you , or if you prefer the UBER monolithic path. The shader is an empty box it do nothing, but i would be curious to get your POV on this because i could try to work on a mantra implementation. Of course some maxwell exotic parameter could be rename. But do you like this logic of infinite BSDF combination ? or do you prefer the mantra shader logic ? Cheers E BSDF_layering_shader.hip Edited March 6, 2015 by sebkaine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jon3de Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 I hope it will arrive sooner or later in H. I´m pretty sure you did read this already...just in case you didn´t. http://forums.odforce.net/topic/21967-houdini-v-ray/ This gives some hope doesn´t it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 6, 2015 Author Share Posted March 6, 2015 (edited) Thanks Jonathan ! i've already see that , but just a prototype for now ... Ok i think we got ourself a bingo ! Thanks to all your advise i have reach my goal ... Mantra 1080P => 26 minutes Settings : - Env + Portal + Photon Map - sample : 4*4 - min sample : 2 - max sample : 10 - noise : 0.004 - reflect limit : 2 - diffuse limit : 2 - min reflect ratio : 1 - light quality : 4 - photon filter : 1 - photon threshold : 1 I ask forgiveness for saying bad thing about mantra photon map ... this is not mental ray here ... Mantra simply kick ass, i think i can even go under 20 minutes with : - optimised VEX shader - using the indirect sampling feature to optimise direct / indirect sample Next time a lighter will said that Mantra suck or is slow i'm gonna have some few materials to discuss about .... Edited March 6, 2015 by sebkaine 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zoki Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 good work emmanuel could you just post latest scene please Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 6, 2015 Author Share Posted March 6, 2015 (edited) https://www.dropbox.com/s/gbtnvlksfz3fp2c/museum.rar?dl=0 here you go. the file is 100mb because i have include all geo / env / photonmap. You just need to update $PROJECT and hit render. Edited March 6, 2015 by sebkaine 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zoki Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 great thanks this will be great help to new houdini/mantra students Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sebkaine Posted March 6, 2015 Author Share Posted March 6, 2015 as a side note unlike V-Ray lightcache which is camera dependant (if my memory is correct). it looks that photon map in mantra are not connected to the camera pov. so if i am correct you can bake GI in a photon map for static asset and render a flythrough at no extra cost. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mzigaib Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 I knew that it could be more optimized but you really went further, I got a 30 min render in 1080 with pixel samples 4X4 I am even curious to discover how you did you really achieve that last render time @sebkaine! Awesome Job! And yeah, Mantra is awesome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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