This is a topic to gather images for Blender 4.0 release notes and user manual. Mainly for rendering related topics.
In general renders should be relatively simple, well lit, and clearly demonstrate the feature. Each render should be an individual image file without text baked in, so that it can be arranged in multiple ways and text can be translated. Quickest is to use (parts of) existing demo files or other creative commons scenes or models.
Ideally we’d have everything by say October 25, about 2 weeks before the planned release on November 7.
New coat settings and layering. Something like car paint, glow stick behind plastic, screen behind glass.
Metallic edge tint. Gold, copper, silver, etc.
Maybe a more complex material combining various different layers, or a scene showing off various different types of materials?
Updated renders of parameter variation for the Principled BSDF user manual. Rather than the 3 big image we have now, we should switch to one image per parameter with 5 values (similar to Principled Hair). This way we can more easily update when new parameters are added. .blend file should be included.
Principled Hair BSDF
Images demonstrating new Huang model. We can use the images for the pull request. Perhaps more samples, less harsh lighting and a view angle that is not straight on would look a bit better.
Renders of parameter variation for the new Huang model and its parameters for the user manual.
AgX view transform.
Some comparisons of Filmic and AgX demonstrating how it better handles bright saturated colors.
The original pull request has some EXR files attached, but it’s unclear what their license is. Using existing public domain or CC licensed content is fine.
Light and shadow linking:
Perhaps one render with and without light linking, to demonstrate its purpose. Like adding rim lights or eye specular to a character without affecting the rest of the scene.
Similar for shadow linking.
Path Guiding Glossy:
Image with/without showing how glossy path guiding can significantly reduce noise.
These look great. The .blend file and HDR file would need to be available under a creative commons license or in the public domain, so that we can store .blend file in our repository and use it for future updates.
This doesn’t show the advantage of AgX clearly enough I think.
Thanks, but I think we want to find something less artificial than those. Maybe someone can adjust the lighting in one of the demo scenes, or maybe there is a good tears of steel EXR file.
Tried making an AgX example. David Head made by @1D_Inc.
I imagine it would be presented as one of these “two images on top of each other with a slider”.
Sponza 2022 Scene created by Frank Meinl.
Additional credit for reference photos
Katica Putica
Princino.photo
Dubrovnik, Croatia
www.princinophoto.com
For personal use and educational use. Limited commercial use for marketing and print in educational, science papers, etc.
Feel free to provide feedback and report any issues to [sponza _dot_ feedback AT intel _dot_ com].
Please note that if these scenes are used in a publication, please include a citation using the following BibTeX template:
@misc{sponza22,
Author = {Frank Meinl and Katica Putica and Cristiano Siqueria and Timothy Heath and Justin Prazen and Sebastian Herholz and Bruce Cherniak and Anton Kaplanyan},
Year = {2022},
Note = {https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-technology/graphics-processing-research/samples.html},
Title = {Intel Sample Library}
}
Thanks to the Sponza and Addon Package Crew:
Frank Meinl
Katica Putica
Cristiano Siqueria
Timothy Heath
Justin Prazen
Sebastian Herholz
Bruce Cherniak
IMO the best AGX demos show it with multiple copies of the same picture with varying light levels. The advantage AGX is showing in this demo is a lack of color shifting, but to see that, you need to see that filmic and AGX agree better when the amount of light is less overwhelming.
Another scene to show case AgX. This scene is created by me using assets from AmbientCG (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License) and PolyHaven (CC0 license).
Note: Art from the video game “Stray” was used as a reference for creating this render.
Holy smokes! The difference between Filmic and AgX here is nuts! I’ve always disliked those Blender scenes, like the ones you find on the Blender subreddit, of some environment rendered in Eevee with tons of supersaturated emissive textures and some astronaut floating around random primitive shapes lol. The emissive colors in those sorts of renders always looked really unappealing. Seeing how AgX makes such a massive difference here makes me wonder now how many of those sorts of renders were truly bad simply because of a broken view transform
This was such an eye-opening moment for me in finally realizing how much better AgX is. Thanks a bunch @Alaska! Great comparison!
I’m afraid not, what we need them for could be considered commercial use. The terminology here is confusing, I think a restriction on commercial use would make it not public domain.
One more question: Can .exr files be in other color spaces (like bt.2020, AP1 or P3)? for example to demonstrate that AgX handles wide gamuts as well. I have a scene that uses the bt.2020 color space and I would like to share if there are no problems with it
