2022-3-29 Blender Rendering Meeting

Meetings
21

Eventually it will, but not clear when.

4 Likes
22

Will this be available via the Buildbot eventually?

I tried building it yesterday on Linux, succeeded in compiling USD from source but building the Hydra delegate stopped at one point. As I’m not a coder or experienced builder I gave up.

23

There’s no specific plan for that at the moment. A problem is that every application requires a different build due to different USD and other library versions, and we don’t have the time to support that kind of thing.

24

I understand, thanks for the info.

Some minutes ago I managed to compile the RadeonProRenderUSD Hydra delegate from source by simply following the documentation on their site https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/RadeonProRenderUSD

It was quite simple and I could build it against an install of Houdini without the need for a separate USD version on my system. If the Cycles delegate would be as easy to build I guess many users could build it themselves.

1 Like
25

I have a suggestion that (sadly) involves big changes: make “World” a light object in the scene, instead of a scene property.

26

The difference here is that the RPR binary libs are pre-built for you… If the cycles libs were prebuilt on build bot it would probably be just as easy.

2 Likes
27

I thought the RPR binaries are pre-built by necessity as it is closed source? If source is available that would be great for community debugging of issues in RPR USD/Hydra or the Blender RPR plugin!

28

The source of the plugins and USD Hydra delegate is available, but the render is binary only.

The point to this discussion is that it might make sense for Blender to provide Cycles dll / .so for purposes of the Hydra delegate. However if it’s using versions of TBB or OpenVDB libraries that are not compatible with say Houdini the DLL might cause symbol issues. (This was the whole point of the VFX platform).

3 Likes
29

Users could set multiple “worlds” at wish, play with their ray-visibility, rotate-move-scale, animate, copy-paste, etc…

30

TBH having the world as an object could be a thing, but we can have many worlds having just one world property, as long as you use Light Gropus you should be able to define many outputs, at least theoretically, and mark one as the main one, that is automatically composed, and the other ones would yo to their LG.

Check the Lg dev notes and future improvements, this is in the least as a possible improvement :slight_smile:

31

Some steps towards getting this building for Houdini here, but it’s not actually working yet.
https://developer.blender.org/D14594

5 Likes
32

I 100% agree. I have never understand why the world is not a light object (or at least why there isn’t a dome type of light object anymore), because in production (we work with maya at the studio) we always rely on different dome lights with tweaked visibilities/intensities combined with light linking…e.g., we use more than one dome, one is only for speculars, one for hair, etc…so we can have a lot of control over certain aspects of the rendering output without having to separate those in different layers/scenes

1 Like
33

Never used Maya, and actually world as a scene property has grown on me as a second nature. But once I started messing with unreal, the concept of world=lamp opened my eyes

1 Like
34

Does the Intel OneAPI use Open CL and if yes could it be used to support AMD GPUs in blender.

35

There are several things here:

1.- Light Linking: not there yet

2.- Light Path: you can already use light path and have different environment for every light path

3.- Multiple worlds illuminating: that’s what Lukas has in his list, multiple worlds as light groups

Si the thing of it being an object or not is totally secondary, the important thing here is to have several environments available in different ways but no need for it to be an object :slight_smile:

36

I remember correctly vega’s hip has been submitted

37

AMD only supports the newer cards right now and some cards on Linux. Considering Apple added RX 580 support and Metal outperforms HIP !!?? Intel’s OneAPI support would be a god send for older AMD GPU users.

38

OneAPI will not work for AMD GPUs, and we’re not using OpenCL.

2 Likes
39

Thanks. I probably misunderstood what I read on the Intel site. That’s sad news for older AMD GPU users though.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documentation/oneapi-programming-guide/top/software-development-process/composability/opencl-code-interoperability.html

40

I agree that world HDRi as “lights” is way better. And it also makes more sense since you can easily rotate a “World Light / 360 Light”