Hi,
I wanted to get some texture baking done with Cycles recently, but I’ve ran into quite a few issues, some of them severe enough to prevent me from actually getting the job done. Instead of creating a long wall of text, I’ve decided to document it on a video. I hope something can be done about this:
I didn’t watch the video yet, but if you find bugs please make bug reports.
In general we developers also much prefer .blend files and text over videos, so we can easily reproduce and refer to the text while we are working on the bug.
Sure, I can do that. The point of this video was to visually explain a quite complex behavior, which would be more difficult to explain in a bug report, and possibly misunderstood by the person trying to reproduce it. But I guess I can always add it to the bug report too.
As someone who did a lot of the initial triaging on the tracker, videos are generally my least favorite cause most of the time it’s just some guy fumbling about for 20 minutes, yours is not quite as bad, but if we allow yours we must allow other people as well.
And while it’s easy to talk badly about people putting effort into reporting issues, lets take a look at what we got, and how a proper bug report would have been better.
why are video’s bad?
information i’m getting out of the first 60 seconds of video
minute 1-3
upto 3:30
just re-iterating what you just shown
3:30-5.45
-Output is noisy at 128 render samples
-Output is equally noisy at 500 render samples but it takes much longer to render.
-Output is equally as noisy with 16 render samples.
-Standard render is still faster!
You’re conflating multiple issues into a single report, which makes tracking the issues more complicated than it should be.
Once I confirm the issue and assign it to a developer, he gets to do the process of watching your video and figuring out the problem all over again.
Once a fix is made and we refer to this thread as an indication what is fixed, whoever is interested will have to sit through your 6 minute video to see what the problem was as well.
No history. Once your issue fixed, odds are you’re gonna pull your video, someone stumbling into this thread 2 years from now or looks in the git log at the commit will have no idea what it was all about.
You could have made 2 bug reports on this. (i filled in random information about the blender version and your platform specifics, actual bug report should actually fill these in properly)
report 1.
Title: Cycles baking performance issues.
**System Information**
Windows 10 x64, nvidia 1080ti , 16g ram
**Blender Version**
Broken: latest master a50375
Worked: never
**Short description of error**
bake at 1024x1024 is slow depending on tilesize and cpu+gpu rendering settigns.
32x32 tile size bake with CPU+GPU : 1m6s
32x32 tile size bake with just CPU : 50s
32x32 tile size bake with just GPU : 4m16s
1024x1024 tile size bake with just GPU : 30s
**Exact steps for others to reproduce the error**
Open attached blend, bake.
report 2.
Title: Cycles AO Baking number of samples has no influence on quality
**System Information**
Windows 10 x64, nvidia 1080ti , 16g ram
**Blender Version**
Broken: latest master a50375
Worked: never
**Short description of error**
Changing the number of render samples has very little influence on the rendernoise of the bake.
[Image with 16 samples]
[Image with 128 samples]
[Image with 500 samples]
**Exact steps for others to reproduce the error**
Open the attached blend, bake.
to warp up: For a bug report to be handled efficiently.
I agree with your points. I have no problem creating bug reports. It’s just that from my past experiences, dealing with developers, videos actually helped a lot making sure repro steps were performed correctly to resolve the issue. But it makes sense to use them as a last resort, not a first one indeed.
I slightly disagree with is this statement:
“the reasons why you are not using 2.8 adds nothing yet made your video 30 seconds longer”
I’ve seen some 2.79 issues dismissed with the answer that 2.79 will no longer be maintained because of 2.8. I wanted to make sure it’s clear that this bug is happening in 2.8, but at the same time wanted to explain why is it then that I am not recording it on 2.8 version.
I don’t know the specifics about what you are referring to, but It is possible indeed that bugs relating to removed components (ie Blender Internal, Game engine) in 2.8 have been closed for this reason, cycles is alive and well in 2.8 so that wouldn’t have applied in this instance, but yeah it’s a case by case judgment the people handling the tickets make, i do realize this sometimes might feel arbitrary to end users.
I agree with you here, having video as supporting material in your ticket although i’m not a huge fan, i can see value in it, however the report cannot be ‘watch this 20 minute video’ it has to be backed with a proper report, in text, describing the issue at hand and preferably with an easy reproduction .blend file.