Is there a link to a list of the currently supported token for the Cycles stand alone renderer?
I have extracted what I can from the posted examples.
I am trying to rotate the world in the Cycles standalone renderer. When I supply values to the vector parameter I see no change in the output…?
How do you rotate the world around the camera?
<background name="World">
<environment_texture name="hdri" filename="./maps/HDRI-Sunny.hdr" vector="90.0 0.0 0.0" />
<background name="bg" strength="1.0" color="1.0 1.0 1.0" />
<connect from="hdri color" to="bg color" />
<connect from="bg background" to="output surface" />
</background>Light linking, groups and Octane like displacement:
Octane and render man have light linking feature, which allows one to exclude certain meshes to not interact with a specific light source. It’s an absolute bomb of a feature especially for product rendering where sometimes you need a light source to only affect a certain object or want to exclude only one object or maybe a collection of objects. Apart from that, most other render engines also have light group feature which allows you to look at multiple lighting scenarios in the compositing phase. Octane happens to have this really amazing way of adding displacement without adding crazy amounts of geometry, since Cycles X is being written from the ground up, I thought these few things would be a nice addition to the engine. These tools are basic and I believe should be included in Cycles X when it finally comes out in October.
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How does that displacement work ? (if not adding geometry)
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I do not know, but if you check out octane’s displacement, it adds really fine details without the need to subdivide or add geometry.
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This looks snappy as hell indeed. Wonder what’s their recipe. How can displacement work if not with mesh tesselation though ? (diagsplit et al) Do you think it’s some parallax trick, like this one? (Parallax Occlusion Mapping)
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I don’t think it could be parallax mapping as it doesn’t work with lower angles, yet here it works perfectly at all angles.I think they might just be using a very “smart” subd mode, where octane adds geometry ONLY where needed to displace. That’s the only thing I can think of. Whatever it is, it’s real good.
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Octane’s Texture Displacement seems to be some form of Voxel Rendering. From my limited understanding it’s drawing a strand for every pixel in a texture with the appropriate displacement length. But it’s mixed with something else. It’s extremely awesome, VERY fast and stable in animations.
Would be a killer feature if Cycles-X had it.
Here’s a sample (almost everything is Displacement):
This is the geometry in the Blender viewport:
Closeup:
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Wow, impressive !!!
They may be similar (I don’t really know how each implementation works) but adaptive subdivision in Cycles has been stuck as an experimental feature for years, is a memory black hole, and not very stable for animation. So only for performance and stability, it can’t be compared to Octane’s texture displacement.
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It’s not using Adaptive Subdivision and doesn’t subdivide the mesh in a traditional sense. At least not with normal polygons. It layers planes, streaks and some other magic. If you use a low texture resolution and zoom in really close, you can see how it works.
I use it for almost anything that needs detail in Octane. It has some limitations but there’s also Vertex Displacement (which is slower and uses more RAM).
Adaptive Subdivision in Cycles is great but you would need to dice the scene at subpixel level to get a similar level of detail (and your RAM would explode). Texture Displacement in Octane works perfect for ~90% of all cases. V-Ray has something similar as far as I know.
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Oh…! So that’s it, Octane’s Vertex Displacement is the one that’s closer to Cycles Adaptive Subdivision, it makes sense now. When I tried Octane the first time I had a hard time with vertex displacement, it is indeed slower.
I thought texture displacement was just a more “refined” version of vertex displacement, thanks for the explanation!
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If you leave “Total 12” it will follow this as maximum value for all other bounces
Try incresing it to 25 then you’ll see
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512 is insanely high and should be enough even in this case. Although I would make a shader that switches to a simple green color after 10 or so transparent bounces, You won’t be able to tell the difference anyway.
Transparent bounces are not affected the total number. It even says so in the tooltip.
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As a lighter, I would love to have a more “artistic” approach to the light parameters. I kinda like having the choice in LuxCore to choose between a “power” parameter or the good old “intensity/exposure”.
Also adding a “temperature” color would be great.
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I’m aware this is fairly niche, but I think I would be really cool if the light path could have more outputs relating to the angle of certain rays, like the halfway vector or the angle of incidence etc…
As for angle of incidence, you have the Layer weight node, or even Fresnel node
About the half-way vector afaik cycles doesn’t have it. And anyway the node should also know what light to take into account (but it’s maybe possible using some vector math?)
But those effects are dependent on camera view, not just on the light rays. Maybe DHX refers to that.