If I read you well, I like the idea, and it’s always something that I was asking myself: now each render starts from scratch, I assume a 0,0,0 black color for every pixel and then the samples add on that with some sort of averaging (it’s rough I know). What if sample #0 is not black but a LookDev or Eevee full render?
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That’s a pretty intereseting concept!
it may generate problems depending on how pixels are added if there are differences between the specularity of one and another, but it could be a good idea, maybe limiting the base render to something basic, like just the albedo + some other pass.
It’ s pretty interesting
It’s just a castle in the air, I’m sure @brecht can dismantle it with reasons in less than 10 words… 
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Crazier things led out to feasible ideas 
so no idea is a bad idea as long as it’s not the final idea 
Blue Noise dithered sampling would probably a better and more consistent way of improving render preview at low samples in the long run. Lukas once did a patch for this. They said they’ll pick up some Cycles patches after 2.8 - maybe this will be one of them.
Or maybe a combination of both?
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You can already test this in Theory Studios builds, in Graphicall.org in conjunction with Scramble Distance.
You can also check this thread here regarding those two features:
Cheers!
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Intel has an open source AI denoiser (Intel Open Image Denoise, or OIDN) which performs similarly to Optix Denoise and runs on CPU. I believe this will be integrated into 2.81.
I’m not suggesting anything illegal here, but does anyone have any idea how E-Cycles is able to be SO MUCH FASTER on Nvidia cards than mainstream cycles is? The forum says “more efficient use of CUDA cores” but what does this mean? The magnitude of optimization integrated into regular cycles would be a lifesaver for me since I’m not in the position to spend on E-Cycles.
You can ask directly to the coder, he seems quite keen on giving answers. And btw he’s going to release the code to blender foundation when E-cycles will be 1 year old. Probably many of those optimizations, if not all, will end in master builds. You’ll just have to (as always ) wait
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Pausing and Resuming rendering would be fantastic to have.
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Good day.
When rendering low-poly objects artifacts appear.
I was looking for answers, but I could not find anything at all. As I understood this problem not only in version 2.8, but was previously.
Is it planned to correct this error or perhaps there is a method for solving it
This is the “Shadow Terminator” problem, this is a problem inherent to any path tracers, it can be reduced with some techniques AFAIK but it will never completely go away, the only way to avoid this is to increase the amount of polygons.
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I was wondering if it is possible to get Shader Input of “nearest surface proximity” (depth. Which has to be known so visible volume is limited by the mesh without clipping).
I get it’s probably computationally expensive, if possible at all, however, functionally, it’d break being chained to what’s now mostly procedural-only clouds/smokes and allow modelling them as free-hand meshes.
Last time I had to create smoke trails I had to resort to procedural curve volume from multiple Empty coordinates. Goes without saying - it is in square of complexity on rendering and at the limit of node count.
There is one huge obstacle to the Blender Nodes and “Group nodes” that prevent me and others from showing the fantastic possibilities Blender has and that is icons on the nodes.
I can do 1 000 pre fabricated textures so all have a huge library to select from, but if you can’t get a clue how it looks before using it… then everything will fail. People turn to Substance or some other tool, where they scroll through a lot of pictures and select what they want to use.
a “preview” icon inside the node or/and an icon library generating previews would be outstanding. Then I had could shown people the power we have in Blender as well by having all these pre fabricated pieces of the puzzle visually in front of them when they try to make a complete material. Now we only have a name… and only by trying hard you will know how that name (like musgrave) looks. I know that the textures will look different depending on the in parameters, but just show it with the default parameters.
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That’s a good point.
I think it should be solved when Asset Manager comes in, but it’s important to stress that could be good to have some kind of option to render a preview of a group, in case it applies to the situation, because other node groups are just tools and have no preview available, for those an icon should be enough.
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very good idea shouldn’t be a problem since blender already is cooking material previue in multiple places in blender.
Any thoughts on this? https://blenderartists.org/t/angular-roughness-1-tip-for-instantly-better-materials-chocofur-tutorial/1178310
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Here the BA thread. https://blenderartists.org/t/angular-roughness-1-tip-for-instantly-better-materials-chocofur-tutorial/1178310/15 and a long-time thread about the topic: https://blenderartists.org/t/micro-angle-dependent-roughness-iridescence/691900/314
There’s no evidence afaik that the effect is a real-world effect.
Imo the better candidate to get a correct effect, is a double coating layer approach
here’s a screenshot that shows the the double coat vs the trick
notice how using the trick totally changes the material appearance: i.e. the background blends into the material, which I don’t think it should
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With Rendermans PxrVolume shader, you can separately controll the Anisotropy of the first volume bounce, and the anisotropy of the following ones. Here it’s called primary and secondary anisotropy. Apparently it let’s you create more physically correct materials for clouds (by setting primary Anisotropy to negative and secondary Anisotropy to positive values).
This might be something to look into for further volume shader development. It would be even better, if the Light Path Node - Ray Depth output would work with volumes (it currently doesn’t), as this would allow to create not only this, but many more interresting effects.
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Can we expect either Photon Mapping or Bidirectional paths tracing for Cycles in the future?
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