Blender Adds Raytracing

Much easier way... by shfted! · 2003-12-13 00:47 · Score: 3, Funny

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.

Re:Much easier way... by originalTMAN · 2003-12-13 01:14 · Score: 3, Funny

nah, but it is pretty coronery.

Blender is getting mature by g_braad · 2003-12-13 00:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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F/OSS & IT Consultant

Re:Blender is getting mature by Exiler · 2003-12-13 01:42 · Score: 4, Informative

In 2.3.

Actually there's been an undo feature for a long while, it was just clunky and unwielding before...

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Banaaaana!
Re:Blender is getting mature by LSD-25 · 2003-12-13 11:26 · Score: 2, Informative

The founders of Exluna were accused by Pixar, their former employer, of misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement and patent infringement. Exluna was able to settle the lawsuit by ending BMRT.
The Demise of BMRT & entropy

Here's a list of RenderMan-compliant renderers. Some of them, like AQSIS, are open source.

Hah... by The-Bus · 2003-12-13 00:49 · Score: 5, Funny

"raytracing is almost usable"

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.

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Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

Re:Hah... by Lars+T. · 2003-12-13 02:04 · Score: 2, Informative

Nope, you mean ray casting (apart from POV-Ray). Look here.

--
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Re:Hah... by Waffle+Iron · 2003-12-13 04:01 · 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.

Impressive but ... by KRYnosemg33 · 2003-12-13 00:49 · Score: 5, Funny

they still have a long way
Compare: www.whitehouse.gov
&
blender.org
Judge for yourself :)

Re:Impressive but ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:47 · Score: 2, Funny

At least, it looks like they got their competitor beat in the area of AI.

What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:50 · 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

Re:What's the use? by shamilton · 2003-12-13 01:09 · Score: 4, Informative

Raytracing is *the* elegant solution. Rasterisers use smoke and mirrors to achieve the same effects. Often those tricks are not flawless -- for example, you often see a smoke or explosion texture intersecting with nearby walls, creating an ugly edge. This is not the kind of thing I would want to see in a production movie, but in a game, it's not so rough.

--
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
Re:What's the use? by Spy+Hunter · 2003-12-13 02:29 · Score: 5, Informative

Raytracing is not THE elegant solution. It is one of many methods of rendering. It is very hard to simulate realistic global ligthing effects using raytracing (soft shadows and light reflecting indirectly off of other surfaces in addition to light coming directly from a light source). For example, take this image. You might think that's a fine raytraced image. But then compare it to this image, produced with radiosity. I think you'll agree that the second image looks *much* more real. Note the subtle shading across the back wall and ceiling, and also the way it is a little bit darker where the walls and ceiling meet at 90 degree angles. Effects like that would be nearly impossible to reproduce with raytracing, and don't even think about real-time rendering. Pictures like this really show how far real-time rendering has to go before it actually looks like reality.
Radiosity isn't *the* solution to rendering either. There are a whole range of lighting effects we see in daily life, and even radiosity only simulates some of them. For example, caustics (the funny patterns of light on the bottom of the pool). Even more general approaches to simulating light are being researched, but I don't really know if any of them are in use commercially yet.
Also, in case you were wondering, Quake/Unreal/etc actually use radiosity rendering as part of the map making process, then store the results in "light maps" which are basically textures that control how light or dark a wall is instead of its color. Pre-computing the lighting allows real-time rendering of nice levels with radiosity effects, but it has several problems. Firstly, light maps take up a lot of memory (there's one for each wall, while most other textures are used on more than one wall and are tiled repeatedly), so they are stored at a pretty low resolution to minimize memory usage. This produces a blocky "stair-step shadow" effect that you've probably seen if you've played Counter-Strike. Secondly, since all the lighting is pre-computed, you can't change it easily. If you want a light to turn on and off, you have to store two light maps for every wall affected by that light: one with it on and one with it off. This is why in most games where you can shoot out lights, there are only a select few that you can shoot out. This approach has even more trouble with moving objects or moving lights (flashlights, car headlights, explosions, muzzle flashes). Real-time OpenGL or DirectX style lighting is usually used for these types of lights and moving objects, but then you don't get the nice shadows and other lighting effects that radiosity gives you.

--
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:What's the use? by PixelSlut · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 2, Insightful

Raytracing is *the* elegant solution. Rasterisers use smoke and mirrors to achieve the same effects. Often those tricks are not flawless -- for example, you often see a smoke or explosion texture intersecting with nearby walls, creating an ugly edge. This is not the kind of thing I would want to see in a production movie, but in a game, it's not so rough.
Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity. The reason you see those problems you stated above has nothing to do with raytracing vs rasterization (because they're essentially geometric problems, and raytracers use geometry in the same way that OpenGL and other rasterizers do), it's because games are real-time, and thus all possibilities are not accounted for. In a movie, the artists have the ability to check every frame for such artifacts, but they don't have that luxery in game development.
I think it's pretty clear that right now, both offline global illumination renderers (raytracing and radiosity) and real-time rasterizers have their places in the current market.
Re:What's the use? by adrianbaugh · 2003-12-13 03:09 · 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.
Re:What's the use? by Animaether · 2003-12-13 03:20 · Score: 5, Informative

Even more general approaches to simulating light are being researched, but I don't really know if any of them are in use commercially yet.

We make a commercial renderer ( Brazil r/s ), and I can safely say "Yes" to that one.

Most of the commercial renderers, either specific or coming with an application, support global illumination through the use of Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling.
It, in essence, does calculate everything accurately - as long as you set the scene up as such.
It's also stupid-slow :)

That's why there's Photon maps, Irradiance Mapping, metropolis light transport, and even more simple constructions such as highly optimized skylighting, arealights/shadows and so forth and so on.
Re:What's the use? by olethrosdc · 2003-12-13 04:02 · Score: 2, Informative

Perhaps, but what radiosity achieves is to model the diffracted light rays from other surfaces. For example, suppose you have a red-coloured surface next to a white one. The red colour normally spills on to the white surface because some of the light diffracted from the red surface reaches the white one. This is quite hard to model accurately with ray-tracing because for every point that you trace back to a surface you must not only calculate the effect of the light coming directly from the light source itself, but from all other points in all other surfaces, because they all transmit live passively. So, it can't work.

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I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Re:What's the use? by kbielefe · 2003-12-13 04:13 · Score: 2, Informative

Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity.
Raytracing is prominent in the renderman feature list as being available since release 11 and used when the shot merits it. I'd be very surprised if raytracing wasn't used in "Finding Nemo" at least.

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Re:What's the use? by hawkstone · 2003-12-13 04:15 · Score: 3, Informative

So, it can't work.

Sure it can! Raytracing can absolutely model diffuse interreflections. However, while radiosity is an analytic (though approximated through a mesh) solution, raytracing typically uses a Monte Carlo sampling technique to achieve this. You can imagine how painfully slow this is, but it works just fine. (And it doesn't require meshing your objects beforehand, either.)
Re:What's the use? by hawkstone · 2003-12-13 06:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Oh, sure it's painful! Extremely, tremendously painful. But mathematically it all works out.

Take caustics, for instance, like a magnifying glass focusing a light source onto a small point on a surface. This is, and has been, done using raytracing.

I've not actually implemented it, but I'm slightly familiar with the techniques. I imagine some intelligent sampling of incident rays, and maybe adaptive supersampling of these rays, would help a lot with the phenomenal costs.

Photon maps are another solution, and (if I remember correctly), they implement forward ray tracing instead of the usual backward ones. Since you can then cast rays from the light source outward, this can be much, much cheaper.
Re:What's the use? by rascal1182 · 2003-12-13 06:28 · 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..."
Re:What's the use? by Animaether · 2003-12-13 09:50 · Score: 2, Informative

Well I don't have the foggiest what you did to mess up your post like that, but to address the things you mentioned...

Yes, a bi-directional monte carlo path tracer

Yes, it's an approximation. It always is. The more samples you take, the more accurate. At some point, takin more samples won't do you much good, and it's accurate enough.

Yes, more advanced shader models (brdf, bssrdf, shader models derived from actual models, etc.) yield better results. But then again, that falls under the whole 'set your scene up accurately' part. Nobody expects accurate results if your shaders are Gouraud :P

I think when we mention 'accurate' here, though, we're talking within the scope of Blender and Blender-like applications. I'm very familiar with medical applications because half the stuff we use comes from research in that field. But for :
- architectural visualization
- broadcast/movie effects
- games cinematics
- etc.
The only level of accuracy that matters is the one that looks good enough.

Ewwwww by r00zky · 2003-12-13 00:59 · Score: 2, Funny

that before and after shoots look like my sister
*bleah*

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I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path

Comparison by Psychic+Burrito · 2003-12-13 01:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

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?

Re:Comparison by woodhouse · 2003-12-13 01:14 · Score: 4, Informative

The lighting is the same, they're just different sizes. I think the differences are pretty obvious though: the scanline-rendered image has no ray-traced reflections, and the shadows all have soft edges (presumably because they're shadow mapped).

Re:Blender on Linux by Quiberon · 2003-12-13 01:08 · Score: 3, Informative

It's probably a matter of configuring your Linux to use hardware graphics. Blender will get the graphics card to do the serious number crunching when it can; look at your graphics card vendor's web site and see if they provide a driver for your Linux.

Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by penguin7of9 · 2003-12-13 01:19 · Score: 4, Funny

You should upgrade to a 24bpp graphics card from your current 8bpp graphics card and the banding will go away. Really.

Re:Blender on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:30 · Score: 2, Informative

Try recompiling blender with special cflags. It really helps with the speed, it can be up to 30-40% faster. Re compiling XFree86 can help too. To find out more, check out the Gentoo project.

Distributions such as Debian, SuSE and Red Hat ship slowest common denomitator binaires, which are very slow. I have done it, and the speed of blender well offsets the installation time.

Has to be said... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:31 · Score: 5, Funny

Bite my shiny metal ass.

Oh, you said Blender...

Raytracing on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:41 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

Re:Not a graphics expert.... by spinflip · 2003-12-13 01:43 · Score: 2, Informative

if you raytrace you actually follow the true path that light would take (or reversed, I am not sure which they use), it is pretty much the best method of rendering realistic objects. this is just the first step towards a very powerful renderer and...*big eyes* Caustics?!?!

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http://sflip.com

If they were serious by greepoman · 2003-12-13 01:49 · Score: 3, Funny

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!

Re:If they were serious by Pflipp · 2003-12-13 02:54 · Score: 2, Funny

who's impressed by a monkey?

Ximian people.

Yay - Blender/GTK+ shouldn't be far away now :-)

--
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]

Mirror by linux_warp · 2003-12-13 01:51 · Score: 5, Informative

Blender.org was being hit hard so I mirrored the before and after pictures on my website, mindwarp.net

Before
After

Re:Mirror by visgoth · 2003-12-13 05:30 · Score: 3, Informative

That's the whole point of using raytracing. The 1st image looks dull because its not reflecting anything. One could generate a reflection map and use that to approximate environmental reflections for the first image, but it wouldn't be very accurate.

My one issue with the second image is the lack of soft shadows. The shadowmaps in the 1st image look nicer than the overly crisp raytraced shadows in the second. If they could implement area lights or some other soft shadowing technique for raytraced shadows it would be good.

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My patience is infinite, my time is not.

Info: The monkey on the picture/other stuff... by Qbertino · 2003-12-13 01:57 · Score: 5, Informative

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 by Pope+Raymond+Lama · 2003-12-13 01:57 · 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.

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-><- no .sig is good sig.

what did they use before?! by dioscaido · 2003-12-13 02:15 · 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.

Re:what did they use before?! by woodhouse · 2003-12-13 03:29 · Score: 2, Informative

Tell that to Pixar. Renderman is raster-based and they were doing just fine last time I checked.

Re:Not a graphics expert.... by Pike65 · 2003-12-13 02:23 · Score: 2, Informative

(or reversed, I am not sure which they use)

I think it has to be done backwards, or you end up shooting rays all over the place, 99.99% of which are completely redundant. Whereas if you trace them from the screen back to their origin you don't end up burning processor cycles in vain.

But I may have that wrong - I'm a real-time graphics guy ; )

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"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65

Re:Not a graphics expert.... by samhalliday · 2003-12-13 02:30 · Score: 3, Informative

are you serious? well... the "before" looks more realistic if you imagine it as a chocolate monkey... but its supposed to be bronze; in which case you must be mad if you think it is more realistic than the "after" image!

Whar Blender really needs... by Pig+Hogger · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

... is a way of outputting POV files.

Re:Whar Blender really needs... by Lumpy · 2003-12-13 03:52 · Score: 3, Informative

it does. please read the blender site to find the plugin to output to POVRAY..

I'd give you the link... but the website is slashdotted into oblivion right now.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.

Before and after pics - a graphics point of view by Adam_Trask · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 4, Informative

Comparing the before and after pics is like an apples-to-oranges comparison. It is technically not "before and after". It should instead be called xyz rendering and ray-tracing. Depending on what the xyz rendering method is, the picture quality will vary. The reflections etc. that can be seen in the ray-tracing image can be reproduced (not exactly, though) using methods like environment maps.

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.

Others Blender Raytracing examples .. by gbitten · 2003-12-13 03:16 · Score: 2, Informative

here

Open source success story by Picass0 · 2003-12-13 03:41 · 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.

Re:Open source success story by digitalhermit · 2003-12-13 04:07 · 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.

Re:Wrote one by JerryKnight · 2003-12-13 04:01 · Score: 2, Informative

Pike65 was talking about tracing the light's path from the light sources. This would be redundant if you did it for every ray from the camera. The trick is to store the light "rays" or "photons" and use them to estimate the illumination at any given point that a ray hits. This is photon mapping, and it can accomplish much better lighting than any "reverse" ray tracing method.

It does have some pretty big deficiencies, which is what my graduate work is about. ;-)

Your tracer looks nice (it's in java?!?), but you don't appear to be doing any attempt at "radiosity" or "global illumination." This is where the real interesting stuff is. You've only scratched the surface. And any math person would say that the math involved here is elementary (that's why I hate math gurus) - A few 3 dimensional line equations, some vector math, a few affine matrix transformations..

If you really like the rendering thing, check out any of a number of books about illumination. The one that inspired me was was Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping by Henrik Wann Jensen.

--

Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.

Re:Blender on Linux by DetectiveThorn · 2003-12-13 04:13 · 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.

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Go ahead /. me. http://www.soylent-

Re:WTF? by vidarh · 2003-12-13 04:52 · 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.

Now let's get some real-time raytracing by PixelSlut · 2003-12-13 05:08 · Score: 3, Informative

Someone recently posted on NeoEngine's forum a link to a development, both software and hardware, towards Real-time raytracing. It's not yet a reality, but think about where it may be in only three years or so.

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.

Before and After pictures by Afrosheen · 2003-12-13 07:11 · Score: 2, Funny

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.

What's with the example picture? by lowkster · 2003-12-13 07:16 · Score: 3, Funny

Ray traced monkeys? No way! Where's the chrome sphere floating over the black and white checkerboard floor?

Hybrid Renderer by dcuny · 2003-12-13 07:19 · Score: 4, Informative

Actually, the beta that Ton posted is a hybrid renderer. It's still primarily a scanline renderer, but you now have the option of using raytracing for shadows and reflections.

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.

Worthless trivia: Renderman only recently acquired raytracing - for the few times that it was actually used, they used the BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Toolkit), a raytracer developed by Larry Gritz. Larry quit Pixar and formed ExLuna, which marketed another Renderman compliant renderer. Pixar sued ExLuna for IP infringement (the exact details are hazy, since they came to an out of court agreement), ExLuna was bought out and all the renderers (including BMRT) disappeared. Soon thereafter, Pixar's Renderman added raytracing support. Still, full raytracing is used in Renderman quite sparingly.

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.

Undo in Blender 2.3* by barista · 2003-12-13 07:24 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Art of Illusion by UpLateDrinkingCoffee · 2003-12-13 07:24 · 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.

Oh please!..... by Billly+Gates · 2003-12-13 07:57 · Score: 4, Funny

Emacs has supported raytracing for years.

--
http://saveie6.com/

Blender is going places by UglyMike · 2003-12-13 10:42 · Score: 5, Informative

Don't forget.... there is a new 600-page book coming out end of this month. This has the new GUI but not the Raytracing part. There is also a Japanese book currently in print. Details on Blender.org

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

internationalisation
way better meta ball implementation
knife tool
raytracer (reflections&shadows)
completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
a newer, better Python API and plenty of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)

These are just my favorites. There is tons of other stuff as well.
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see

Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
better nurbs based on Nurbana
integrated bevel tool (script-based bevel already exists.)
Integrated REAL raytracer (YafRay)
further tuning of the new GUI
???

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.

Re:Art of Illusion - exellent stuff by vik · 2003-12-13 11:11 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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 :v)

Re:What I want to know is .... by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:12 · Score: 2, Informative

Blender.org is based on postnuke, though the design was modified by Xype. He used either Windows or Mac OS X, with Dreawmeaver/Photoshop/etc. Blender3d.org was designed and built on Windows with Dreamweaver/Photoshop/etc.

On the other hand, there may not really be much there that technically couldn't be done on UNIX/Linux software, though a) it may involve repeated head-bangning-against-the-wall and wasted time due to the interfaces of much of the programmer designed *nix graphics software interfaces, and b) it's not the software that produces the site, it's the designer, and not many good designers use Linux.

Although Blender is popular in the Linux world, 85%~90% of its users run Windows. It's a cross platform piece of software, so I wouldn't make assumptions about things being done on UNIX.

Cheers

Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:17 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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