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Blender Adds Raytracing
rastachops writes "Blender, the Open Source 3D modelling tool has recently added Raytracing to its extensive list of features. 'Believe it or not, but Ton has integrated the raytracer from Blender's predecessor, Traces into Blender. He said "the algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that's forty times faster than in the early 1990's and raytracing is almost usable". For a comparison checkout the before and after screenshots.'"
There's a much easier way to Ray-trace that involves very little processing time: just shoot Ray in the street and the cops will come trace him with chalk.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Hopefully they add even more usable features to it, like a decent shader... and a better user interface. I still prefer Maya for my overall work, but if Blender is evolving in this same pace. It is perhaps someday possible to switch to a cheaper solution
F/OSS & IT Consultant
Well, at least we've got someone that is being truthful about their software's feature set... A bit too refreshing, if you ask me.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
they still have a long way :)
Compare: www.whitehouse.gov
&
blender.org
Judge for yourself
Can anyone explain what the point of doing raytracing is over quicker better methods?. Raytracing uses inordinate amounts of time and processing wasting CPU cycles, to do what is in effect just an emulation of what a human eye or camera might see. The speed advantage of proper pixel shaders can't be ignored I think, it's several orders of magnitude quicker and to me doesn't look any different
Banding? You have no idea what you are talking about.
that before and after shoots look like my sister
*bleah*
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
I'm a long time user of Blender, and I'm thrilled that they've added raytracing....
My one beef with Blender, however, is the terrible performance on Linux. It is so poor, I maintain a Windows partition solely for Blender use.
I know you guys love Linux (and so do I!), but if you plan on using Blender, best to have a Win32 OS lying around somewhere.
Hmm... wouldn't it be much easier to compare the two renderers if the rendered the same picture, the same size, and with the same lighting?
Sir, You may do well to change browsers. No banding is present in the 'after' image.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Maybe you've got your colour depth set too low?
I presume he must mean the background
Looks like they're raytracing on their webserver, or could it be something else?
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
You should upgrade to a 24bpp graphics card from your current 8bpp graphics card and the banding will go away. Really.
OK, this is cool, now for a mirror of the screenshots...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Oh, you said Blender...
So if someone can explain it to me, what's the difference? I actually thought the 'before' image looked more realistic.
Raytracing was usable on my amiga in the 90s. Geez. Sure, you had to go make a cup of coffee or three per frame of an animation, but it was definitely usable. Packages like Real3D actually did raytracing (and scanlining too - the PC usage of "raytracing" seems closer to amiga "scanlining" and the PC usage of "radiosity" seems closer to amiga "raytracing"... dunno why...). Realsoft 3D, a distant descendant of Real3D is available for linux Right Now.
Raytracing on Linux is already usable. Apart from POV , which AFAIK can do raytracing, Realsoft 3D, a new version of the old amiga Real3D (that also did raytracing, not just scanlining... WAY back in the 1990s...) is available for linux.
If they were really serious they wouldnt use a monkey, who's impressed by a monkey? Use a dragon or a hot chic like that butterfly girl nvidia uses. I mean come on!
Blender.org was being hit hard so I mirrored the before and after pictures on my website, mindwarp.net
Before
After
FYI: The monkey on the pictures is called "Suzanne" - she's a girl - and is the mascot of blender. This year the Blender "Suzanne" awards got handed out as a small bronze statuette of the very same shape you see rendered on the pictures.
:-)
Further down somebody talks about more features (shader, etc.)
This was a big issue with the 'future developement talks' at the blender conference this year. Software design issues were discussed and different approaches were evaluated. This years suzanne animation award winner has designed a shader tool that will be integrated into / act as a interface/usability reference for the big blender 3.0 redo. Which will have a shading enviroment integrated. Some other major parts of the new stuff will probably make extensive use of the Yafray raytracer and the basic design that went into it.
Far out dreaming into the future led to considering a solid interface to the OSS crystal space 3D engine as to bring back the closed source realtime stuff into blender and provide a professional editor and design tool for crystal space.
The problem with that is that CS has a totally different structure than recent and current realtime solutions in blender, so this only is an option after the big Blender 3.0 redo that will shed all the dirty hacks and establish a solid software design to the Blender codebase.
So goes the plan for blenders future.
Can't say no to this karma-whoring, can you?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I just had a blender workshop this week, and I can say: What a piece of software!
It si just great..definetivelly not ewasy to learn on one's self from the ground up. At elast not with another miriad of multimedia packages that come in any modern distro.
I have always being a POVray fan, and I'd say that some kinds of work I still could do faster on POVRay than on Blender, but it is great to see even more features in it.
Anyway, blender is wellcome to the team.
-><- no
Expect MicroSoft's legal dept. to embrace and extend a C & D for using Ballmer's image without his consent.
Actually my poor quality macintosh and PC with LCD display show the image in its smooth state, but only my professional Amiga 2000 with mil-spec processors (make sure you get the ceramic ones with gold heatsink) shows up the image for the poor quality it is.
This is a pretty funny headline, for me, considering I just came out of a weeks worth of 16 hour a day straight programming to implement an advanced raytracer for my graphics course. What did they use *before* the raytracer? Ray tracing allows you all kinds of gorgeous real-world effects, like wavelength dependent refraction, shadows, and lots of lens effects.
lol, idiot.... he didnt mean that blenders new feature is almost usable. he meant raytracing in general... he talked about the raytracing speed right before he said it, how could you miss that? 'raytracing almost usable', aka 'it doesnt take 2 million light years to render' please read, dont just write granted its not perfect in those pictures, but ive gotten great results, and its a big step up
> 'it doesnt take 2 million light years to render'
Oh sure, you just wait two miles and it's done...
... is a way of outputting POV files.
Raytracing won't get you much in the way of caustics, you need other methods too, such as surface subdivision, photon tracing, etc. Kind of like the difference between scanline rendering and radiosity.
I am not trying to put down the quality of ray-tracing though, it is the best. Others try to simulate ray-tracing. But folks rarely use ray-tracing in interactive settings (like gaming). Unless you can play at less than 1 fps.
Uh... no. The banding is quite apparent on anything.
Blender sucks (it didn't even have undo until recently)... what a piece of crap
gcc's optimizations aren't very good. Just compiling for 686 with -O2 is as aggresive as you should go. Look at some benchmarks some time, dumb gentoo users frequently slow their systems down by adding too many optimization flags that end up having the opposite effect.
here
If you haven't seen it yet, you should check out yafray. Truly a 2nd generation free 3d renderer.
We wrote a raytracer in graphics class. We shot the rays from where the observer was, just one for each pixel (or whatever resolution you wanted). That way you aren't "shooting them all over the place." If the object is shiny when the ray hits it, move the eye to the point where it hit, figure out the angle of reflection (using quite a bit of mathy stuff) and continue from there.
Here is my ratracer written for class, and here is the majority of the source for it. Also, we did a raytracer using some previous code my prof had, and I was able to add antialiasing and using a grid of objects to render, as seen here. Warning, its a 136 k jpg.
Actually, I think it's been my favorite class so far. Lots of applied programming, math, and neat pics to look at afterward.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Whatever the reason, the first image does look better. Of course, if the monkey is supposed to be made out of metal than it's not bad but I can't make my mind to the fact that the metal is actually bronze, it doesn't have the texture, nor the color, nor the reflectivity of bronze, the "before" image is smoother and more pleasing for the eyes, the "after" one is blocky and "cheap" the reflections are totally unrealistic, I don't care some manual says that raytracing is better, as much as I mix sound with my ears and not the board meters, one should create 3D with his eyes not some sort of theory...
...ou quelquechose comme ca... ;)
Anyways, even if technicaly speaking the "after" image is better, visually speaking it isn't.
Oh yeah, one more thing...
I started using open source software out of curiosity a few month ago and I agree with people saying open source develloppers should stop going "I am god" everytime they have an idea or a draft of some idea, make that idea into usable, stable code and give it a well crafted interface and when it's actually working then implement it, partial features are way too numerous in open source software...
Anyways, keep the good work, I might sound harsh but I'm actually excited that crazy stuff like 3D creation apps are progressing well in the open source community, at this pace we might see some nice and usable stuff sooner than later.
liberte
solidarite
fraternite
As a blender user and foundation member I've watched as the features, inovations, and rate of development have gone up since it went open source and GPL last year. We have tons of new python scripts, a new gui that continues to evolve, better rendering...
It's not Maya, but it's on par with anything in the low-mid range for windows, and it's getting better by leaps and bounds
Give Blender a couple years and we might Hollywood contributing code. Hollywood lves Gimp, and I could see this becoming a real player in 3D.
Many people think that raytracing is a must have feature for serious CG. Pixar did not use raytracing or any other type of global illumination technique before Nemo.
Anyway, this doesn't mean Blender isn't growing up.
new for 2004! ray tracing technology to be featured in these exciting products: watching paint dry VR X-treme continental drifting MS visual navel contemplator
Blender had Undo, but apparently you were too stupid to read the manual.
Out of curiosity, how was the statuette produced? Was the output of blender used in the making of a mold or numerically-controlled machine instruction file?
I ask because I've begun wondering if blender could be used for modeling things that would ultimately be made in the real world, like prototypes of enclosures, mechanical gears, etc.
I Was once in an engineering study where they put me in a dimly lit room for an hour and told me to choose between real photo's and rendered photo's. This was a few years ago, but it was still very impressive.
They showed us the pictures in sets of ten. When after we were done comparing, they explained that they were all pics in a set were either all rendered or all real. (which explains why i had to pic 8~10 in a row alot) They also explained the purpose of their test which was to create a system for making artificial lighting effects by using simulations of real light. While they weren't quite there yet. I am sure that they are progressing with this technology.
Either way I got VS 6.0 for it, and as a poor college student, it was like three years of christmas @ once! 8')
-DW
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Anyone know which progs might have been used to whip up their site (other than vi)? What are your favorite eyecandy web progs? Sorry to get offtopic and thank you for the info, slashdot folks!
I took a look at the radiosity tutorial from which those pictures come, and it's really well written. It's clear that raytracing is better than nothing, but that other techniques will yield even more realistic images.
Of course, people also already have photon mapping working on the most recent generations of NVIDIA and ATI hardware offerings, and I think I recall someone from NVIDIA saying at some point that they expected this to be able to work at interactive framerates sometime during the NV4x cycle of GPUs.
... raytracing is almost usable
Yes, all we now need is a complete rewrite of Blenders UI-from-hell(TM) so people finally can say the same thing about Blender.
She is the looker in the family.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Blender had that year of non-development and was stuck at 2.23 until NAN was able to get the donations to free the code.
Since Blender has come a long way adding in Quicktime export, a new interface, NTSC (16:9 HD) rendering size. Granted the Game engine had been removed, but still it was comming along and getting a lot of attention.
I just worked this fall for my old company as a consultant helping them move to Maya and Linux. They spend about $40k on Maya linceses. They looked at blender, but the fact that one had to export to a 3rd party app, like POV-Ray, for raytracing was a big strike against it.
I hope they leave Raytracing as an option, because one of Blender's advatages was it its speed without raytracing.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Ive been using blender for about 6 months now. i started using it when my boss needed some 3d animations for his lectures., as a rule i allways try to use opensource software before i go out and buy stuff. i have made several animations in blender and i love it. the I is a little hard to get use too. but Ive done just about everything i need to do in it. the only qualm i have about it is documentation. i know there is Elysium but sometimes you just want a good user manual with nice tutorials on how to do everything. i think I'm going to donate to blender. 1 ) because i use it allot 2) because i don't thing i can contribute with code 3) i love the program.
also i made an animation of a carrier engagement and another 3d artist made one with lightwave, and in many aspects my version was better than his. so i think that blender can compete with the mainstream,
Where are the before and after pictures of the server pre-and-post slashdotting?
Figure 1. A normal webserver
Figure 2. A molten, smoking mass.
Ray traced monkeys? No way! Where's the chrome sphere floating over the black and white checkerboard floor?
Ton's had the raytracer written for some time now, but it never got incorporated into Blender. The preview is the first to incorporate the code.
You could already do shadows and reflections in Blender, but they were simulated with shadowmaps and reflection maps, the same way that Pixar's Renderman renderer had done it.
The Yafray (Yet Another Free Raytracer) is a stand-alone full raytracer with a lot of features that has nice integration (thanks to Python scripting) in Blender. Future versions of Blender promise to integrate it more tightly, and seems more likely that's where a 'full raytrace' option for Blender will come from.
AFAIK, it only works in Edit mode, but you can use it by either hitting the U key, or by hitting the spacebar and in the pop-up menu go to Edit, then Undo.
It's quite useful, and you can also set how many levels of Undo you want. You can also set it to auto save every so many minutes.
The Blender documentation is ongoing, but they are coming out with a new 2.3 manual in January. 600+ pages and Blender 2.31 on a CD, along with tutorials.
Check out blender.org for the main site and some useful overviews. To really hone your skills, visit Elysiun and browse the forums. They are all about Blender and have sections for animation, modelling contests, GameBlender (Blender 2.25), and an extensive artwork section. To me, Elysiun is a great place to learn about different aspects of modelling in Blender.
If you guys like blender, you might be interested in another project called Art of Illusion. It is a poly-based modeller and renderer and I have seen some amazing results. It's completely open source (GPL I think) and achieves great performance being written completely in Java. Check it out, and also the other work Nate has done.
Ok, so you won't get this if you don't play FireArms.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
http://saveie6.com/
Light years are a unit of distance, not time.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
the one they have now is pretty piss poor.
Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond in some shops or simply downloaded as a PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a newer documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content. Of course, there is also a truckload of tutorials available on the Net
Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others
These are just my favorites. There is tons of other stuff as well.
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see
And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
If your first encounter with Blender's non-standard GUI made you trow up your hands in disgust, you should consider to try it again.
Yup, I use ArtOfIllusion for commercial artwork. It is indeed most exellent and powerful. Not only that, but there is some great documentation available for it too.
:v)
It would be great if Blender and ArtOfIllusion could share a decent file format. It'd save everyone a lot of heartache in the long term.
It has rendering and raytracing options, so both camps can be kept happy. Oh, and don't be put off by its use of Java. This is by far the speediest Java graphics app I've come across anywhere.
Vik
That's got a very nice rendering engine as well as rastering, and a user interface that 3D Studio Max affectionados will easily understand. It'll export to POV, which is handy sometimes as you can model a tricky object in the GUI, then import it into a POV script later.
:)
:v)
Oh yeah, runs on Windows and Mac too. Guess someone might find that useful
http://www.artofillusion.org
Vik
As has been mentioned previously, this /. article is very premature. The news announcement on blender.org is letting users know that it's being worked on. At the time of the announcement, there had been one CVS commit, no bug fixing, no UI design, and no testing. It's at quite a preliminary stage, and quite a number of bugs have already been fixed since the announcement. In any case, it is a positive piece of news, for those hanging out for this feature.
i dont care
ever seen a car going so slow that you said "geez buddy, how bout going more than 2 miles an hour!"... now whyd you say that?... because its going sooooooo sloooow.. blenders renderer goes from bottom to top, it travels that distance :) traveling distance takes time, and traveling 2 million light years would take a helluva lot of time just for a raytraced sphere!! /"way to save your butt grandpa" ;)
So you grew up to be a programmer, Jacob. How's the Hooded Fang enjoying his retirement?
You have to keep in mind this is a
package that was developed to be used by
someone else, not developed to be sold on a
shelf.. Pixar makes their own inhouse software
for instance, they only use Maya because their artists couldn't have learned their inhouse software before coming to Pixar, and their inhouse software is their proprietary experience, that nobody else owns.. Also its also the way they can keep their animators from leaving, if you know pixar's software really well and its not available to Pixar's competitors, you are only as useful as the experience you can abstract away from what you know of Pixar's software.. Same goes for Maya..
However the case with blender is its never going away.. And if it becomes a industry tool, it will mean less means to leverage artists into binding relationships with companies and with proprietary software vendors.. Thus Maya becomes only as good as it really is, and Pixar is only able to retain the artists that really want to stay. Its that case anyway.. But the existence of blender allows ayone with access to a computer a choice..
The reason there is any seperation between the exlcusively feeling wannabe or professional 3D artists using proprietary high dollar packages and everyone else is produced by jealousy. Its like the difference between Mick Jagger and Keither Richards.. But everyone is offered the ability to become a "rock&roll knight". So while the ones who would scoff, scoff, watch as their investment in a high-dollar package gradually deminish in value, and they pick on the lowly blender users as a result..
But its questionable if their art is worth as much as their say.. If you feel threatened, you probably are not a very good artist anyhow.. If you invest much of yoru artistic value int he tools, you are not a very good artist..
Sorry..
Just say no to license servers!!
OK, here a bigger post:
Blender has indeed been developed as an in-house tool for NeoGeo (the former biggest dutch animation studio), and that's what its interface is like. (I'm talking about the *old* interface, not the UNUSABLE current 2.3 one).
I'm probably one of the most hard-core blender users around. I am also maintaining my own tree of Blender since it got open-source, and I've developped about half of the new features since open-sourcing first in my tree, and then ported them / had them been ported to the official release.
One of the main motivations to maintain my private tree with the OLD interface is because I do *work* with blender (not play), and its old interface (which many people here classify as "from Hell" or "unusable") is in fact THE most usable and most efficient interface I've met in my whole computers career.
It is very different, it is very hard to learn, but that's no problem at all if you want to train yourself to do *one* thing with *one* application *perfectly* - and that's what Blender was meant for after all - it is an IN-HOUSE tool.
The new interface (2.3) adds more clicks for achieving the same results, is slower and more bloated, and I must say that I dislike it - which is why I'm even more motivated to maintain my own tree further.
Anyone who complains about Blender's UI is simply not serious about WORK.
Thank y00!