Hi,
Cycles is already a fast engine, but a lot of improvements are still possible and Brecht committed one today.
It does not affect the render time, but the BVH building time at the beginning of a render.

The changes can be tested in the soc-2011-tomato branch for now and you need svn revision 45917 or above.

The BVH  stores all the geometry of your scene, so the engine can render it. Depending on the amount of geometry and the scenes complexity, the BVH build can take a second or a few minutes. If you render an animation where you only move the camera or only the shaders are changing, it does not need to rebuild the cache for each frame. There is already an option “BVH Cache” option for that in the Performance panel. But if actual geometry is changing or moving around, Cycles must rebuild the BVH on each frame. And this can take time. If you have a fast GPU, it might even take longer than the actual ray-tracing time.

Well this is over now. BVH building time is now multi threaded and heavy optimizations have been done. Let’s compare some times between Blender 2.63 RC1 and the Tomato Branch with the improved code. I tested a few scenes and measured the time from pressing F12 to seeing the first rendered sample. Note: “Spatial Split” was disabled. (Test system: Core i7 2630QM, 8GB Ram, Geforce 540M)

Scene 1: Audi-R8 from Blendswap

Blender 2.63 RC1: 43 seconds
Blender Tomato: 11 seconds

Scene 2: BMPS Material Preview Scene

Blender 2.63 RC1: 44 seconds
Blender Tomato: 8 seconds

Scene 3: 19 Billion Poly Scene (Instancing)

Blender 2.63 RC1: 11 seconds
Blender Tomato: 6 seconds

Scene 4: Subdivided Cube

1.5 Million Polygons:
Blender 2.63 RC1: 84 seconds
Blender Tomato: 12 seconds

6.3 Million Polygons:
Blender 2.63 RC1: 371 seconds
Blender Tomato: 51 seconds

The conclusion is clear I think. This has a real production value and in very heavy scenes it’s an improvement you don’t want to miss any longer. If you don’t have the Tomato branch, the improvements should be in Trunk next week, so it will be included in Blender 2.64. Have fun!

Hi,
Brecht just added a useful new feature, Sample clamping.

Sample clamping, reducing heavy noise

It’s disabled (0.0) by default, but if you increase the value, the samples will be clamped by the given value.
This can help to decrease noise. Here a scene where it gave significant benefits, less heavy noise, same look and same render time. (50 samples, no compositing, scene by Florian Schäfer)

Candle Clamping

In other scenes it helps decreasing noise too, but it looses some of the light dynamic.
I rendered Mike Pan’s BMW scene (no compositing, 100 samples) with different clamp values, check out the result:

BMW Test scene with different clamp values

Hey everyone,
Brecht was very busy the last few weeks and he added a lot of great improvements.
Recently he added Render Passes, which can be used for all kind of compositing effects.

See the commit log for details: SVN 43693
Documentation: Wiki docs

They are working on CPU and nvidia GPUs with Computing Capability 2.0 or above (Fermi cards). It will work for OpenCL too, but OpenCL itself has still some issues on AMD cards.

Apart from the obvious passes, like Z-depth or Normal there are the so called Lighting Passes, which are quite interesting.
As you can see in the Documentation (link above), you can use the different ones to get the combined result.

I took my Monkey Test scene (.blend file) and it is interesting to see those separated passes for direct/indirect influence, colour and environment light.

The combined image

Hi everyone,
the new year starts with a lot of fun!
Two days ago I decided to give the Cycles shader code a try and add a new node to the system.

I have done some Cycles – Blender integration and UI things last year, but this was new land for me.
As I liked the Checker Texture in the Blender Internal texture nodes, I decided to port that node over.

And voilà, here it is:

The Checkerboard Texture

My patch has been committed today by Brecht.

I learned a lot, porting that node to Cycles, was great fun. The commit is also a good reference for other developers, to see how to add a Texture Node. It’s not that trivial (at least it was not for me) and having the code run on CPU and GPU doesn’t make it easier.

The Checkerboard Texture in use

Thanks to Dalai Felinto, who helped me debugging and to Brecht van Lommel for some final tweaks. Also thanks to Robin Allen (who wrote the Blender Internal Texture Nodes).

So! Grab a new SVN Trunk build from Graphicall or compile yourself and have fun with it!

You can download the blend file for the Image shown above here.

Thomas

Amsterdam, the beautiful capital of the Netherlands, was crowded with Blenderheads last weekend again. For the 10th time already!
The Blender Conference 2011 was held from 28. October to the 30. October 2011 at De Balie, near the Vondelpark.

It was the third time I visited Amsterdam and the Blender Conference and it was the greatest one so far.

Amsterdam in the morning

Day 1: Friday

Me and some other Blenderheads, arrived by train at 9 o’clock in the morning at Amsterdam Centraal. After checking in at the hostel, we went straight to the conference at De Balie.

This year I was not only a visitor. Nathan Letwory and I have been assigned as speaker assistants, to make sure the schedule is being followed as good as possible (you can’t avoid delays though) and to help the visitors, if they have any questions. But this went really smooth and it was a lot of fun too! Thanks Nathan and Ton!

We already had some great presentations on the first day.Ton Roosendaal’s keynote talk at 11 o’clock was great as always and he gave an good overview of what will happen on the next year, to name a few things: Project Mango, the Blender Network, and the Blender proceedings (a magazine, with Blender documentation). It will be interesting.

The next highlight came right after Ton. Brecht van Lommel, one of the developers currently working for the Blender Institute, gave a talk on his new render engine Cycles. He talked about the design and the goals of the engine, the new node-based shading system, and the plans for it. The most important thing to know:

• Cycles will be merged to trunk in 1-2 weeks, and will be included in the upcoming Blender 2.61 release.
• It will be available as an external render engine and NOT replace the Blender Internal anytime soon!

He will focus on the texture workflow, presets, border rendering and stability for the next few weeks, and afterwards work on speed enhancements (He talked about 2-3x faster rendering speed , maybe even more is possible) and then one feature at a time will be added.

Brecht, talking about Cycles

After this visual start, Jörg Müller showcased his Audio system and thew new 3D sound in 2.60!

In the afternoon I listened to Keir Meirle, the developer for Libmv (tracking) and afterwards to Joery Kassenaar, who talked about the history of Blender in the 90ies. It was very exciting to see many animations that have been done with Blender this early.

In the evening a small group went to a pizza restaurant and had some fun.

Day 2: Saturday

The second day, started with lots of tomatoes! At 10 o’clock, Sergey Sharybin introduced his Motion Tracker, which will also be merged to trunk very soon! Sergey also gave an quick overview of the code and invited everyone to help with it (writing patches, reporting bugs). From source code to arts: The audience laughed a lot, when they saw Big Buck Bunny rope skipping inside a crowd of people in Amsterdam. Sebastian König, showed how mature and stable the tracker already is.

Sergey (with Sintel t-shirt) right before his presentation

Rope skipping Bunny

At 11 o’cklock, Elizabeth Mix from Butler University held her presentation “Blender in the context of Art History and New Media”, which was really great. She showed some paintings from several artists and compared style and techniques to Blender art. Very profound talk.

Afterwards, I talked a lot with other people. That’s the most important thing at a conference in my opinion. You meet so many people from all over the world. A great way to socialize! We actually had people from all continents there.

Okay, we had the Cycles render engine and the Motion Tracker, what else could blow away your mind? Right! The new Compositor by Jeroen Bakker. He demoed his latest improvements and showed how fast the new compositor is, compared to the (only single threaded) one we have currently in Blender. And that was even without OpenCL yet. He will now start with the migration of the Nodes to OpenCL, which will give another big boost. Help for that is welcome!

At 19:45, the annual Suzanne Festival Award Ceremony was awarded. I had the honour to announce the nominees of the first category (Best Character Animation) and the winner! Nathan Letwory did the second category and Pablo Vazquez the third one.

Me, announcing the winner of the first category (image by Sebastian König)

The winners of all categories are:

• Best Character Animation: Studio Midstraeti – Iceland Express Ad Campaign
• Best Designed Short: Jonathan Lax and Ben Simonds from Gecko Animation Ltd. – Assembly: Life in Macrospace
• Best Short Film: Mathieu Auvray – Babioles

Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks for all the great submissions this year, it was a pleasure to watch the screening.

To celebrate the winners and to have a lot of fun, most of the conference people went to the Saturday dinner at the Vertigo restaurant. Lot’s of great Italian food there!

Day 3 : Sunday

The third and last day of the Blender Conference begun with stunning visual shots from Project London! Ian Hubert definitely knows what he is doing! He screened the Project London trailer and some other VFX film work of him. Right afterwards he and Ton talked about the Mango Open Movie project, which Ian will direct. This will be so exciting, they have high goals, hopefully they can accomplish them. Project Mango will also have a developer sprint before the project starts this time, which is great. They want to fix Blender’s dependency graph, which will finally make the “animate everything” feature work as the user would expect and will improve the animation system to be multi threaded.

Ian Hubert during his presentation about Project London

At 13 o’clock I held my presentation (in German). There have been about 35 people from German speaking countries at the conference, which is great! I talked about the past 3 German Blender Conferences (BlenderDay), our forum blend.polis and the other great resources and events we have here.

Right afterwards, Gottfried Hofmann did his “Simulation Masterclass” and blew away the audience with stunning smoke simulations!

Lukas Tönne showcased his “Node-based Particle System Development” at 16:45. Great new possibilities with it, but the project is still in the beginning. But this looks very promising, it will give more flexibility to particles.

The master of giant Node setups, Andy Goralczyk, presented his new Stop motion film project Omega together with Eva Franz. This is visually really an extraordinary film. Stop motion, very detailed, with Blender CG effects and After Effects compositing. The teaser they showed us is mind blowing!

Eva and Andy giving us an insight behind the scenes of Omega

Sadly, all good things come to an end. Ton did the “Closing session” at 18 o’clock. Everyone was a bit sad and we applauded a lot! Thanks a lot to Ton, Nathan, Anja and Anne for organizing/helping and for making the conference what it is, a great place to be every year for all Blenderheads!

We went to an Indian restaurant today, first time I ate Indian food.

But no worries, we still had the chance to visit the Blender Institute the next day.

Day 4: Monday

From 11:00 to 18:00 the Blender Institute was open for visit.

Me, sitting at one of the workstations at the Blender Institute

We had a lot of fun there and I talked to many people, especially with other developers. This was a great opportunity to discuss future ideas and plans to implement. I have lots of ideas in mind at the moment.

Ton gave a tour on the institute as well, he showed us all the rooms, the Justa cluster and the new Renderfarm sponsored by Dell.

Ton, showing Big Buck Bunny storyboard drawings

Some of the conference highlights:

• Lots of great presentations about new development features (Cycles, Tracker, Compositor, Particle Nodes…)
• Lots of stunning work in the Suzanne Screening
• Great people and talks
• Yummy dinners

I want to thank everyone who made this conference possible! Ton you rock!

Also thanks to my room mates Jonathan, Sebastian, Sergey and Tobias for four funny and great days!

See you next year again!

On Friday, 21. october 2011, Sebastian, Francesco, Tobias and I have been at the Third Dimension conference, organized by Weltenbauer, in Frankfurt am Main.
Sebastian held a presentation at 10 o’clock, which Francesco, Tobias and I unfortunately missed due to a traffic jam.

So, Sebastian already set up the Blender booth when we arrived art 11 o’clock at the Saalbau Gutleut, where the event took place.
I installed the Blender signs, which we already used at FMX, so people could easily see where we are and I connected my laptop to the monitor (because the normal booth computer had no CUDA/OpenCL) so we could demo the Cycles render engine as well.

Sebastian König demoing the tomato branch tracker to the booth visitors

We received nice resonance again, people were interested in our new features and were very excited about the upcoming features.

I am glad that the tomato branch and Cycles will get merged soon, because explaining to people the difference between trunk (and the resulting main release) and branches is a bit difficult sometimes! For demoing cycles we mostly used the BMV scene from Mike Pan and the Football by Daniel Salazar. Thank you guys!

The main/entrance hall, where all the booths were

In the afternoon we also got the chance to run Cycles on a CADnetwork workstation. It consisted of 1 nVidia Quadro FX 6000 and 3 Tesla cards. Unfortunately, Cycles can only allocate 1 card at the moment, multi GPU support is still on the todo list. Nevertheless, it ran at an amazing speed! Thanks guys for putting a hand on your powerful machines!

Sebastian, testing the Cycles engine on the CADnetwork machine

At 17:00 o’clock the conference was over and we drove back home, after an interesting day!

Congratulations to the Weltenbauer team for the great conference and thanks for allowing us to present Blender there! It has been a real pleasure!

Maybe we will be there next year again!

Laters,

Thomas

Here is the report of the second day of BlenderDay/2011.
When I went to school at 8 o’clock in the morning, I thought it would be a bit more relaxed, but it was the exact opposite.

Oliver Schömann, presenting Character Sculpting

At 10 o’clock Oliver Schömann started the second day with a great presentation about character sculpting. A real good start and perfect preparation for the modelling contest which came right after Olivers presentation. Andy Goralczyk announced the topic of the contest at 11:30, which was “Insect”. Everyone who accepted the challenge, now had 60 minutes of time to model and render (only Ambient Occlusion render) an insect. The three best images won a Blend & Paint DVD and we also gave away a fourth DVD to someone, who did an insecticide, very creative. More infos will follow soon on blenderday.de.

After lunch, Julian Herzog held his presentation “3D-Grafik aus der Sicht eines Fotografen” (3D from the point of view of a photographer).

At about 16 o’clock, Gottfried Hofmann did the last presentation of this years BlenderDay. He showcased some of his Smoke and Fire stuff, which was really impressive. His presentation was over 2 1/2 hours long, he nearly couldn’t stop.

Gottfried Hofmann, presenting Fire and Smoke

So, what was so stressful this day?

There were some plans (already from last years BlenderDay) to build a new foundation for the BlenderDay and the German forum blend.polis. And we spontaneously decided to put the plan into action right there, at BlenderDay/2011. So a few people, including myself, locked themselves up in computer room 119 and brought this idea to the next level. Can’t say much more about it at this current stage, but I hope it can be officially announced in a few weeks.

This was the last BlenderDay, organized by the “Schülerfirma” BlendVision from the Erich Kästner Gymnasium. Two people from our team finished school this year and the other ones will do their Abitur next year, so we will be too busy to continue here. It was a real pleasure for all of us, and in behalf of the team, I’d like so say Thank You for three years of BlenderDay!

No worries, the BlenderDay will continue next year, just in a different form. I won’t give away or give up my baby!

Blenderheads eating lunch

Andy Goralczyk, showing some of his cool artwork