Suggestions on topic for Master’s Thesis on Blender

I’m the person who worked on a spectral version of Cycles. I’m more than happy to have a chat with you about my findings and discuss some technical details about it if it is the sort of thing you’re interested in. The engine implementation is one aspect but then there is the other aspect of ‘how do you present a spectral rendering workflow to users in a friendly and effective way?’ Both are interesting and complex problems.

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Interesting, I’ll look into it later! Thank you for the suggestion!

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I think there are other more suitable “research platforms” for rendering, but it could be an interesting thing to look in to.

I’ve been seeing some more about Spectral Rendering, and it is a fascinating subject, so fascinating in fact that I already took note on my personal list of possible suggestions!

Thank you once again :smile:

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Hi there, I only say your comments now! Is there an already functioning version of a Spectral implementation on Cycles?

Hi, I have a branch of 2.79 which was mostly functioning, except for volumes and I think a few light types. Although the visual benefit is very small if you cannot somehow define spectral colours. That’s the biggest issue I ran into, the work in converting the engine is one thing, the harder task is to expose spectral data to the user in an easy to use way.

I’ll see if I can dig up my branch.

Thank you for the quick replies! I’m still at work now, and I have not even began preparing a thesis, I’m just looking at my options :slight_smile:

I found my work, I could either send you a diff file or publish a branch somewhere. Just let me know if you decide to pursue this. I’d love to see it get some more attention and looking back at the work that I did in 1 week (thanks git log) I’d say it is certainly achievable.

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Well, I would love something that I could finish from beginning to end! I am moderately freaking out if I’m being fully honest :slight_smile: If I do end up pursuing this, I’ll let you know so I can look at your work with more attention. Even if I decide I won’t do this, I’ll still give you a heads up so as to not leave you hanging!

If someone else has any more suggestions, I’d love to hear what you think!

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Sounds good :slight_smile: I wish you luck whatever you choose to pursue!

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Many thanks! :smiley:

Hmm… Maybe it would be a good idea to have a chat with @sybren? He’s a blender dev and has a PhD in computer science, so maybe he could give you some tips?

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Thanks for the pointer, I’ll contact him tomorrow :slight_smile:

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How about advanced retargeting, or implicit skinning?

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Somethinf I forgot the other day:
There is a youtube channel called “Two Minute Papers” with lots of really cool stuff, most of it is CG related. A lot of it is simulations. You might be inspired after seeing all the cool ideas presented on that channel. Maybe there’s some interesting ways of combining simulation and rendering- like using velocity vectors in shaders? Maybe you could research motion blur and cache formats like Alembic and VDB.

Here’s a paper that would be cool for riggers and animators: http://rodolphe-vaillant.fr/permalinks/implicit_skinning_project.php It’s a method of deforming armatures without self-intersection. ddade mentioned it while I was writing this!

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Wow, I have never heard of any of that before! I’ll check it out in the morning, it’s been a long work day!

@ddade @Josephbburg Thank you for the suggestion once again. Even though I should be resting I saw some more about what it was, and it was fascinating! Has no attempt been made at porting that technology to Blender? The paper did state that they used Blender for the rendering part.

Regardless, I already added that too to the list of possible suggestions :slight_smile:

I’ve been thinking about it during my vacations, and I think I’ve narrowed down to the topic I would really love to work on: real time rendering.

Eevee is a game changer, and after using it extensively throughout the last months, I noticed some problems. One of them was the problem of flickering on reflections using lower sample counts. Refractions also had some issues, and overall performance was a bit lacking.

I would like to tackle issues for Eevee, but I don’t know which ones are more important / are actively being worked upon. Is there a roadmap for Eevee? The last one I saw was from 2017 if I’m not mistaken.

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you can get an overview right here:

https://developer.blender.org/T64282

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That is beautiful, thank you so much! I’ll start reading everything about this later today, currently on holiday but highly excited about the thesis!

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