Rendered with path tracing in 4.3.08.frontier

Started by Matt, September 27, 2018, 04:34:15 AM

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ajcgi

Damn that's clear. Good ol Disney. Good ol ILM. Good ol Pixar. Oh ffs, whoever they are these days, well done them.
The concept of rendering anything is hard to explain to my mates back home so this could help.
;D

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: Oshyan on October 04, 2018, 10:45:23 PM
As far as what is unique about it for Terragen, the current rendering method uses a "GI Cache", which is a method for calculating indirect lighting that relies on a pre-rendering phase which *roughly* calculates the potential for light bouncing in the scene and then holds onto that information in memory. The renderer then references that pre-calculated cache during rendering. Path Tracing, on the other hand, directly traces the path of light for every sample (which can be done multiple times per pixel), and thus is a more accurate approach, though understandably slower.

This is a little bit confusing to me.
If I understand correctly this holds true for bi-directional path tracing (BDPT), but not for TG's unidirectional path tracing?

Matt

Read the Wikipedia page on path tracing and look at the section on BDPT. PT is just the "gathering" part, and it is done for every pixel.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Dune

Finally found some time to test path tracing on older files. I don't really know where to post this, so here it is; two path traced old files. The one with the rock wasn't really the one I meant to render (it's not that nice), but okay, here it is anyway. The other one took 3.5 hours at detail 6 AA6, soft shadows, focal blur, etc.

WAS

Very nice Ulco, definitely noticeable difference in shadows. The second really comes together nicely with the shadows behind the wood and in the trees.

Excited to see more from this. I wonder if glass will be working by the time it's out of frontier?

Oshyan

Hard to say without seeing a direct comparison of same image without PT, but these do look pretty nice, especially in foliage.

- Oshyan

Dune

Of course. Here they are. I may have edited out the DOF-GISD artifacts that appear with normal rendering, and used different post-contrast settings in PS, though.

WAS

Yeah path tracing does look better imo. Trees just seem stale without it now, to be honest. :O

I am curious how that structure in the second image would look path traced with subtle a non-ray traced reflection to the wood.

Oshyan

The cliff scene is hard to see much benefit in, especially with the differing processing. But the other looks notably nicer with PT, better character and vegetation shading, and nicer shadows on the dead tree, etc.

- Oshyan

Dune

Yeah. It's definitely a huge step forward, but I don't see myself rendering a 12m museum wall with Path trace at this moment  :P I just hope Matt can bring speed up in due time.

I was also wondering; if you check path tracing the GISD is still on. Should that not be automatically turned off, or doesn't it work anyway in path tracing, whether checked or not?

Antoine

#40
It seems to me that GISD only works if "standard renderer" is checked, so even if it's on, it doesn't apply with path tracing. Same thing for "exagerate surface details, it only works when path tracing on surfaces is checked.
By the way is there a difference between GISD and exagerate surface details in term of ambient occlusion effect ?

David.

WAS

Quote from: Antoine on October 10, 2018, 04:26:53 AM
It seems to me that GISD only works if "standard renderer" is checked, so even if it's on, it doesn't apply with path tracing. Same thing for "exagerate surface details, it only works when path tracing on surfaces is checked.
By the way is there a difference between GISD and exagerate surface details in term of ambient occlusion effect ?

David.

I believe Oshyan or Matt mentioned Exaggerate Surface details is more of AO effect, and less accurate than GISD that takes environment into account.

Matt

It's exactly the same thing, but we call it "exaggerate" because with path tracing you shouldn't need to use it, and using it makes the render less realistic.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

Quote from: Dune on October 10, 2018, 02:36:06 AM
Yeah. It's definitely a huge step forward, but I don't see myself rendering a 12m museum wall with Path trace at this moment  :P I just hope Matt can bring speed up in due time.

I was also wondering; if you check path tracing the GISD is still on. Should that not be automatically turned off, or doesn't it work anyway in path tracing, whether checked or not?

What build are you using? There are two sets of GISD settings; one for "standard renderer" and another for path tracing. The latter is not realistic to use, so it's disabled by default, but we offer it because some people want to use it anyway.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Dune

4.3.09. I see the two sets, with the lower being disabled, but I was just wondering if the top one (GISD) still works with path tracing and whether I should manually turn that off (beacuse it would be "double"), or that it's not working by definition anyway. I didn't pay attention to the final seconds of the render phase, or I would have known.