Right now I can do the 3.0 vs 3.1 in a MacBook Pro M1, sadly I don’t have access to a M1 Pro or Max.
I can use some of the demo files to do this comparison.
After that I’ll try to do some comparison regarding point clouds doing a sim with Storm and rendering it in 3.0 with sphere instancing and 3.1 with point cloud rendering.
This is because I think there is no demo file for the point cloud rendering that can really showcase the real leverage of the new feature
For the point cloud demo you could use the renders from: Taichi_elements (MPM solver for Blender) - Blender Tests - Blender Artists Community (with proper usage request of course). He did that with a physics engine that is being implemented in blender. From the amount of points in his simulation and the quality of his videos I think he would be a good candidate in that area.
I currently have a project where I’m rendering aroud 40 million points that have been simulated in another software. I’ll share the results here in case they might be useful for the release notes.
Right now I have this scene, I’m using manta flow and rendering the manta particles as point cloud directly, without exporting to alembic.
The render time for this is around 45 seconds per frame at 1080p in the most complex frames, with a single RTX 2080Ti, I want to compare this to the way we needed to render foam and other particles before, it was way slower.
I’m right now exporting to Alembic to be able to have motion vectors in particles because there is no way to get them from within blender particles directly, I hope to have this scene ready soon, and I’ll share also de .blend, could be useful as an example maybe.
Here I have a scene that I think would be better for point cloud, I’m working on it, right now it’s 4.5 million particles, rendered at 13 seconds per frame.
My target is to get it to 40 million particles, I need to find the time to do the sim and solve a problem with the sim software because for some reason I don’t have velocity vectors, but that’s a minor problem
This may be of interest. I recently released a new PLY importer, “import-ply-as-verts”, for point clouds on our Github Repo . Illustrated here is a 5.9M vertex cloud from Mandelbulb3D (with correct vertex colors and faux-PBR Material) using Cycles Point Cloud render for nearly instantaneous viewport render, 21.81 second full render @ 30 samples with Denoising on a RTX 3070.
@brecht I don’t know if @pablovazquez was able to edit both shots (I gave him raw frames), so just in case for simplicity for the wiki, here are the two final videos.
Information: 90 million particles generated with Geometry Nodes, 20 million simulated sand particles.
