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Sunflow Open Source Renderer


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  • 3 weeks later...

The scene description looks a hell of a lot like Arnold's. I'm pretty sure that anyone with a week free could write an export pipeline to this using the new python tools in Houdini 9.0. You'd have to put together some simple stand-in shaders in Houdini that could be translated out into this renderer since it doesn't support (easily) programmable shaders.

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Just out of curiosity, is there a way to write any data out of apprentice?

... images don't count :P

*edit - By the way Jason, what else do you know about Arnold? I'm surprised how it never came out of the shadows. And people who beta tested it don't know anything. The only thing I've heard about Arnold is that Project Messiah Renderer was an early version of it.

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*edit - By the way Jason, what else do you know about Arnold? I'm surprised how it never came out of the shadows.

Marcos, the author, sells Arnold as a library to companies - and also a skinny standalone using the library. The major intention is for people to be able to embed Arnold into their existing software easily. It is a blazingly fast raytracer but IMO for feature work it really needs to be shouldered by a team of programmers on the client side (like Sony did for Monster House 3D, a look for which the product was just made to do). For software developers like AutoCAD or whatever that need a mid-level renderer to show off their models, it's a great thing.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks; it was a fun project:) Now we just have to wait till there is a public beta and I'll upload the full source code for everyone to look at or enhance or simply delete :)

I don't know what kind of limitations Apprentice will have with respect to this new export pipeline technology since it does leave the door wide open for it to be abused; but lets hope they can work it out to enable people to experiment with writing or using custom pipelines using Apprentice. If not, buy a copy of Select if you can - and play!

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Thanks; it was a fun project:) Now we just have to wait till there is a public beta and I'll upload the full source code for everyone to look at or enhance or simply delete :)

'Till then, how about some nice renders for us?

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  • 3 months later...

Hahaha! Cool work, well done.

Are you using their new scene format? Or their old one? I'm very sure that my exporter wouldn't work that well now since the Houdini 9 export pipeline has evolved during Alpha and I haven't looked at it in a while.

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Hahaha! Cool work, well done.

Are you using their new scene format? Or their old one? I'm very sure that my exporter wouldn't work that well now since the Houdini 9 export pipeline has evolved during Alpha and I haven't looked at it in a while.

Not sure which one is which :o . --> 0.7.1. Most of my efforts went to not have to change much on target side. hscript --> Python --> SunFlow. There is only one routine on SunFlow side. If you like, lets say, Indigo.. it needs to be anther one routine for it. Rest stay the same. I'll be happy to show you this, guys, but for now it would be complete chaos. Doc/tut/one complete otl needs to be done. And it gonna has short life. I must say that after few days playing with SunFlow and Indigo I even more admire Mantra. It is so... solid and reliable.

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Ladne! :blink:

Could you please tell us more about advantages of sunflow speed over mantra - do you think it's much faster? What is your impression, is it a good way to follow in the future, or rather a little bit cumbersome to work with? How about exporting shaders, there isn't easy, straightforward way to translate them to sunflow...? :unsure:

kuba

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Ladne! :blink:

Could you please tell us more about advantages of sunflow speed over mantra - do you think it's much faster? What is your impression, is it a good way to follow in the future, or rather a little bit cumbersome to work with? How about exporting shaders, there isn't easy, straightforward way to translate them to sunflow...? :unsure:

kuba

I don't think you can compare speed between them. I haven't tired Sunflow but I sometimes play with Indigo, and because of it's unbiased nature, a rendering is never finished, you just stop it when you think it looks ok (noise free). The good side of renderers like this is that it is really simple to set up a scene to render, just add a few light bulbs or the sun position and you're set to go. The down part is that to make "tricks" like a diferent light falloff, soft shadow maps, etc. it is impossible (please correct me if you can in Sunflow). And some "natural phenomena" like sun light thru a glass window or caustics reflections on mirrors would just take a life time to show up. For the sun thru glass problem there is a special shader called ghost-glass that does some reflections but no refraction so is only viable for thin surfaces, and if I'm not mistaken for caustics to show up on mirros the way out would be photon map.

In my humble computer at home, just one frame on Indigo can take the whole night to look good.

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