Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Blender Adds Raytracing

Posted by michael on from the puree-liquefy-churn dept.

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.'"

11 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:What's the use? by adrianbaugh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Your raytracing example appears to be using a point light source and not modelling any atmospheric effects, so naturally it looks rather basic. If you use a proper extended light source and set up your raytracer to model the atmosphere properly then it will look much better. If your raytracing program can't do that it's a limitation of that particular program, not raytracing in general.
      Of course, proper accurate raytracing as I've described will take a /lot/ more CPU time...

      --
      "'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
      - JRR Tolkien.
    2. Re:What's the use? by rascal1182 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      IIRC, not a lick of ray tracing has was used in "Finding Nemo." Only a handful of scenes in all of the Pixar films have employed ray tracing. It just takes too long to get an image that's good enough. On the other hand, Blue Sky's "Ice Age" was entirely ray traced.

      The REYES algorithm (the scanline algorithm that has been the "backbone" of Renderman since its creation) is incredibly fast, but with great results. A G5 at Pixar's booth at the SIGGRAPH conference last summer was rendering a frame of "Finding Nemo" for all to see - I couldn't imagine how long it would take a ray tracer (with that complex of a lighting scheme) to finish this.

      More importantly, ray tracing capabilities are new to Renderman's 11th release (the current one). Anyone who was "ray tracing in Renderman" a few years ago was lying to you. Again at the SIGGRAPH conference, Pixar was presenting the new ray tracing-based features of Renderman. They looked cool and all, but not the focus of the package. Heck, even to quote the very page you linked to:
      Techniques that long-time RenderMan users have learned and refined will continue to be useful and effective - think of Release 11's new ray tracing features as an important addition to your bag of tricks.

      This is all incredibly off topic. Renderman is not even in competition with Blender; they're two entirely different beasts. My point is that ray tracing, especially in the context of production, is not all that important. However, I'm very pleased that Blender is maturing as well as it is. Although this particular feature isn't too useful to me - I've never touched Maya 5's new mentalray capabilities, either - I'm excited that it will bring more people (and attention) to the only good animation package I can afford to use at home.
      --

      "Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
  2. I Just had a Blender workshop by Pope+Raymond+Lama · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 .sig is good sig.
  3. what did they use before?! by dioscaido · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  4. Open source success story by Picass0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Open source success story by digitalhermit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Completely agree. Blender is a real workhorse now. It's stable, fast, and I can do a lot of things very quickly. In one demo I created an airplane complete with rivets, rusty tail section and bullet holes in under 15 minutes. It can easily replace many of the $15,000 setups used in news stations or even some low end studios.

  5. Re:Hah... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Wolf and Doom were Raycasting, not Raytracing. Conceptually a little similar, I guess, but in Wolf and Doom, the rays stopped after the first hit - they didn't reflect, refract or transmit through the material and hit more things, and in the wolf raycast, the raycaset was essentially 2D, used to pick entire columns out from a texture.

    It was also essentially 2D (often called "2-1/2D") in Doom. They used some major trickery to make it look like you had real 3D. However, the tricks greatly constrained the map topology that could be used. For example, there are no "bridges" anywhere in doom; there is always exactly one ceiling and one floor at any point in the map. IIRC, there were no slopes either, only steps.

    The fact that you could play the entire game and never notice these limitations goes to show just how skilled the map artists were.

  6. Re:Blender on Linux by DetectiveThorn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What an odd comment. Even in the relatively early days (I personally started with rev 1.76) Blender has always rendered faster under Linux than Windows. Editing performance was a bit of a problem, since most gfx cards did not support Hardware acceleration under linux. (DRI was a fairly new addition to XFree86 at that time.) Blender is rather 3D graffics hardware intensive (are any 3D apps not?) as it was born under Irix on SGI boxes. However, things have changed. Two of the major vendors of high-end 3D gfx cards now have very good accelerated support either through their own driver (NVidia) or the DRI module (ATI). With the former, performance between Windows and Linux is nearly identical. For ATI users Linux performance can often be better, due to the fact that ATI's Windows drivers are much more painful to configure than DRl (you probably could get better performance from Window's drivers if you spent many many hours tweaking the ATI driver settings). Those two brands of card probably cover 95% of all serious 3D users. Blender is ment to be a proffessional application, not a toy. It has a way to go to be on par with Maya or LW, but even now, as an 80% ready application at 0% cost, it is an excelent tool for beginers, and even many professionals who don't regularly need many of the advanced (and expensive) features of the high end packages. I'll even risk being /.'s http://www.soylent-green.com to see some of my blender work. And I'm not even a power user.

    --
    Go ahead /. me. http://www.soylent-
  7. Re:WTF? by vidarh · · Score: 2, Interesting
    You miss the point. Implementing raytracing is "trivial". You can spend lots of effort at adding effects and handling materials realistically, and optimizing for speed, but a basic raytracing algorithm can be outlined on a sheet of A4 paper with sufficient detail for someone to implement it.

    The news is that Blender now has built in support for it, so that you can raytrace your models to see how they'll look without messing with a separate program.

  8. Art of Illusion by UpLateDrinkingCoffee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.