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WebGL Path Tracing


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http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

Path tracing is a realistic lighting algorithm that simulates light bouncing around a scene.

This path tracer uses WebGL for realtime performance and supports diffuse, mirrored, and glossy surfaces.

The path tracer is continually rendering, so the scene will start off grainy and become smoother over time.

B)

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That WebGL is impressive, didn't think it was capable of that. Displaying/presenting 3d models and scenes on a portfolio website or forum in an interactive ray-tracer, that would be very cool.

+1 for Andrew integrating the Intel path-tracer into 3DC... ;) (Joking...really...maybe...)

I'd rather see a more advanced DirectX renderer (Element 3D, Marmoset toolbag, etc)

Thanks for sharing pixo, I'll try to compile it when I get a chance.

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+1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

http://blogs.intel.c...ate_photo-real/

Embree Support forum

http://software.inte.../forums/embree/

to add a render source code need time to be implemented. Dev team need to add the code in all OS version and make it bug free...

I duno the schedule of changes prior v4 but...

maybe to add an exporter for like example LuxRender or whatever -another free unbiased renderengine- will be a less stressed change

3DC need a better render room.

And is a priority because the digital image need lo look awesome... for sharing, presentation, prototype, personal use...

Think rendering an image inside 3DC at this level of detail:

Done in blender and rendered with luxrender.

imperial_crown_a.jpg

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A Global illumination Pathtracer in 3dcoat-render room is a very important tool for art.

It's great to sculpt and have a fast preview.

GI pathtracers "eat" shadows, you have to carve deeper sometimes. It's important to have also a hdri background.

The render room as it stands now is very good for previewing game engines only.

This will change rapidly in the near future.

Our friend Digman posted an interesting render. This gave me the opportunity to post some of my ideas about sculpting and art in general.

New blender dynamic topology sculpting project is already here.

A sculpting dynamic tessellated project by Nicholas Bishop.

Similar to sculptris but with greater potentials, closer to LC mode.

The real innovation though comes from the combination of DynaTopology and Cycles renderer.

Sculpt under a physically correct renderer, on ready wonderful procedural materials. A must to have in 3dcoat.

A few cycles/DynaTopology blender only doodles, testing and testing LOL :

twoOldPL.jpg

draperyStudyHeadL.jpg

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It's more a way of seeing than a technique...

A quote from what Michalis said on my thread...

"Sculpting is all about light and shadows. It's how it captures lighting. There isn't any short of clipping path around a mesh, this may exist in our imagination only. Light "eats" the mesh and in the end we have a space full of shapes of light and shadow."

We have light and shadow all around us but how we see light and shadow using it to create form, curve and line in sculpture or painting that is art...

If sculpting is all about light and shadows that creates a problem for us using sculpting programs because of the below...

In 3DCoat and other software it is hard to see light and shadow because of the nature of the programs. Voxel mode has more of I what I would call fluorescent lighting and we lose the shadows for our sculpts. Look at a painting on large white background and the painting all but disappears. Too much of that kind of light is not a good thing...

We are in essence sculpting with one eye sort of speak.You can turn on shadows under the voxel menu but that is limited and the internal render is not that great for setting your lights to help create light and shadow over your sculpt as you really can not freely move them around the scene plus there is no GI I believe.

Technically, being able to adjust lighting in a program is crucial for us to "see" because if too much fluorescent light is present how can we see...

I am starting to use Blender cycles for feedback when I sculpt as I can use the Applink to update the sculpt in Blender. The idea for using Cycles came from Michalis...

By the way, I'm not asking for more rendering features, to expect a program to meet every single need for the artist is not realistic.. If 3DCoat had all the bells and whistles of Zbrush, Mudbox, Renderman etc... plus all it's own great features, it would cost well beyond the means of a lot of us...

Also for me personally I'm trying to see more but see less in creating sculptures... if that makes sense...

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@pixo

Agreed, but you're talking about shapes. Shapes of what? This the question.

The point of my post on this topic is to show how important a GI pathtracer can be when sculpting.

Thanks Tony Nemo

What technique? It took many many years to understand that I have to draw or sculpt what I understand only. Avoiding to add any details that I simply see.

But the basic principles are: start adding clear forms. Booleans. A sphere on a cube. Then sculpt on it. The more details you add the more you lose the clear truth of the sphere on a cube.

Where to stop is very personal.

What about a study on an egyptian masterpiece? Under egyptian sun. Abu Simbel

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If you talked about pure art and sculpture exposition i'm agree with you,but if we talk for instance about a character that with be animated and seen under or kind of lighting and position i'm sure you ll be agree with me too.

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@pixo

You're right but please, read the whole tex on digman's wip topic.

The ability to sculpt under a GI pathtrace environment. My dream. Blender makes it "almost possible".

Blender sculpting is also innovating now (dynatopology) but still not comparable to 3dcoat (and zbrush of course)

But, I loved the way cycles is getting involved on it. In many ways. You see, blender also has vertex painting and tex painting tools. There isn't any luxury of Ps like layers. But but,... here comes cycles with the nodes system. You can have as much tex paints or vert paint sets and combine them via cycles nodes. A much more innovative and unique way IMO. The day when cycles will bake them to a map isn't far. Do you see my point?

The alter ego of my dog. A blender only project, dynatopo+vertex painting + cycles.

AlterEgo.jpg

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@Michalis , i understand but don't bother you it will comes a day in 3D Coat too because everybody is switching to path tracing.

There's is a plenty of free path tracer on internet that can be integrate without year of dev for Andrew.

I believe Embree is one off them if understand the Apache license but i'm not a lawer.

It's just the faster path tracer that i tested ,simply cause it's minimalist and doesn't have to manage complex scene linking, nodal,procedure etc.

It's just perfect for displaying a model ,intel provide it with physically plausible shader with there respective distributions.

It manages per samples attenuation(fresnel per samples) which is not the case of Cycle's brdf :p from what i saw on one of your shading network,anyway we don't care, it only matters for very rough reflections.

For instance the Crown scene totally converged in 5 minutes with 16 depths in reflection ,diffusion and refraction (direct indirect and environment) .

On a 3 years old computer, It manages in average to deal with 5 millions paths per second, which is really impressive.

Anyway it will come a day where it will be a standard.

Personally i just need a good old Lambert for my modeling.

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What are we trying to say here?

From my point of view it goes this way:

A render engine that's capable to bake everything into textures.

A render engine based on nodes system makes useless and aged any attempt to bring Ps adobe ways on it.

We live in a multi threaded world now, can you get it? A different logic, in fact this is logic.

DO you have any idea how free you feel when building a cycles nodes setup? Instead of layers... you add a node (multiplier, more than, less than, burn etc etc ) and make loops. The more sick you feel the better. LOL

Add some well tempered sculpting tools and have a unique, innovative, new interface.

Blender is so close to this but there isn't and wont be anyone that will organize it. It's the truth, I'm afraid so.

Maybe Andrew should consider to start working on a such base before others do it.

It's the future.

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Michalis it's already exist for long time in almost all proper studio that's treating a lot of shots.

It's not only about nodal by the way, evaluation scene's attribute at render time,dynamic attribute assignation and much more.

For a commercial packages that's already do that you should have a look to "Katana" and "Guerilla".

By the way you can't code easily your distribution and bsdf in the blender path tracer, especially with a proper shading language.

I tried to find it on the net , i just found some preset for the different shader,sorry if i'm wrong ...

This is not the future it's already there in production since longtime sorry to disappoint you , we didn't wait for blender or autodesk to do that.

By the way we didn't bake in textures because it's too limited,too much time to setup,take too much disk space and awfully inelegant.... just imagine to do it on a big city... the good way to do it ,is to bake whatever you want in a point cloud,it's much more efficient .

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eh, I'm not disappointed at all, actually you don't need to bake everything in blender cycles either.

But I was talking about the future of 3dcoat... right?

I have to stop it now. It doesn't go anywhere... sorry.

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No offense pixo, not at all, it's OK.

I have my small collection of sculpting apps here, 3dc, zbrush, sculptris, why should I start sculpting in a alpha problematic version of dynatopo blender?

Because of the wonderful cycles preview. Among other things like the blender edit mode, vertexpainting multiple sets etc in hand.

The concept matters more than anything, what follows next is a well known procedure. Except of just trashing it LOL

I love zbrush for instance. I also like the UI whatever others may say. But, I hate its camera, I hate its renderer or the preview. Very impressive to some but not for me. I don't know what I'm doing sometimes, how deep I carve, how I capture light. 3dcoat renderer is much better IMO but not comparable to a GI raytracer.

I don't know much about big studios either. The only I know is that in the last few years they feel the cinemas with the deepest yawns. So predictable art... never happened before.

A predictable procedure creates predictable art. The soldier, the marine, the robots, the transformers, eh and sometimes silly blue humanoids

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We are agree.

For the big studio,

Imho ,Full CG or VFX in cinema isn't art at all , just business at least for 99.99% of the productions.

To be fair some peoples that i met or worked with think it is,i'm clearly disagree.

Just to make it clear my concern isn't art.

In 3D Coat or Zbrush , i'll probably shock you but i never use more than 1 brush and never save any preset, i just pushed the vertices with what i had.

I never felt block at all, even today with 3D Coat my only concern is more about the Color management and the pipeline , the way to export the data and to share it with other software.

Kind,

Pixo

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Just to make it clear my concern isn't art.

In 3D Coat or Zbrush , i'll probably shock you but i never use more than 1 brush and never save any preset

You don't shock me at all, actually this gets you closer to art.

I also use 3-4 tools only.

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Allow me some more takes

2g%233S.jpg

2g%232S.jpg

portr%238aS.jpg

portrM1S.jpg

Because I missed this forum...

But also because these tests reminds me another issue.

What to do with these triangulated dynamically tessellated meshes?

Retopo first, right. Blender is OK on this for people that likes to work internally.

Then I realized that cycles supports displacements and bumps only. No normal maps. (this is coming soon but I doubt if such methods are good to go for pathtracers).

So, we 're coming to displacement maps. I just realized that blender has two possible workarounds to bake such maps. One via shrinkwrapping of the multi subdivided mesh (similar to zbrush), a second under bake panel (select to active). This adopts hi freg form the hi def mesh onto the cage UV mesh on top of it. It's rather similar to the 3dcoat method.

Both methods work good if normal maps are what we ask. Normal maps are a forgiving method. (he he sometimes it isn't)

But for displacements... shrinkwrap method provides fine displacement maps close to thef zbrush's crispness. The second, some blurry maps that I don't like. 3dcoat produces better results than blender but still a little blurry.

All tests using 2048x2048 32 bit exr displacement maps.

So, pathtracers welcome. This gonna change a lot of workflows. Displacements, vector displacements, micro displacements...

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you might as well of been writing in Greek

is it so bad?

The problem is that similar issues exist in most of 3d apps.

How to bake a decent displacement map. Or, should I say two for each figure?

Path traycers love displacements and bumps, not normal maps.

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If Cycles (Blender) is so "modern" and powerful then why doesn't it even have support for Normal Maps? I mean, that's like giving your kids cereal in the morning without having any milk to go with it. "Well, uh, kids...it's really good...and crunchy...and has cinnamon sprinkles." :D

What "modern" renderer doesn't support normal maps? I do get tired of hearing how awesome Blender is, and yet it's half finished all over, it seems.

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