A Massive Update is Coming To Cycles!
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- Опубліковано 5 жов 2022
- Path guiding is coming to blender, and it has the potential to reduce render times massively in some circumstances. This is great news for everyone, especially those who are stuck using less than ideal equiptment such as old GPUs, CPUs and laptops.
Here's my guide to optimising Blender where I talk further about how path tracing engines work. - • The Easy Way to Optimi...
You can read Thomas Müller's papers here - tom94.net
Here's a blog post about Intel's open path guiding library, including some really great examples of noise reduction. - www.intel.com/content/www/us/...
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I started using Blender about 5 years ago, like v2.7 or so, and there's always talk about upcoming features that sound incredible so I was always on the edge of my seat thinking "I want that now, I can't wait, that'll be so awesome". It always seems like waiting forever but soon the next release comes and then same thing happens again. Now we've got v3.3 and I'm saying "remember when we didn't have this feature" or "remember when the interface was like blah blah blah". In hindsight, it seems like yesterday. Blender has come a long way very fast and the future looks super bright.
Yeah. I just back to older versions sometimes and I'm always blown away by how different Blender is. Even 2.8 seems so limited compared to 3.4. No cyclesX, adaptive sampling, geo nodes, asset browser, etc.
Yep. Blender 2.79 for me. And I have ascended beyond the donut. That is all though. All these years later, I remain a pleb...
@@andrewvirtue5048 yeah i started with 2.79 too, im amazed to see how far it has come since
I cannot believe that a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce snuck into the shot again!
My normal camera can't see that part of my desk so I thought it was out of the shot. 🤪
It's great sauce :D
@@olutukko2681 it is. But if it accidentally ends up in another video I think I'll have to ask for a sponsorship fee 🙂
In a couple of minutes and with no graphics, you explained path tracing better than anything I've seen. Thank you! 😁
Thanks. There's a better explanation in the video I've linked in the description.
yah, nice choice of words! and illustrations
Blender is so amazing, and yea there might be some limitations, but it's forever growing and pushing to be better. God bless the Blender crew for keeping this open sourced and allowing creatives access to studio quality software and an amazing community as well. ❤️
I guess god is something for crazy people, this is science, lets keep imaginary friends out of this
Thanks for the heads up, that's really interesting, and your explanation made plenty of sense.
It's really good to know about these things in advance, and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses, so we know how/when to use them to best effect.
On a related note, I'm wondering whether anyone would like to make a bet on how soon we'll see real time path-tracing, at say, 1080p, at decent frame rates (for the whole scene, not just selected highlights), on the desktop/workstation/insane powerhouse etc?
The continuing optimisations made in software combined with the insane power of modern gpus make this inevitable, I think, but it's difficult to estimate when this might happen.
Yes, it will probably be very expensive, and involve four xx90 class gpus stuck into something, but that's not the point. The point is, it would be incredible, because it wasn't that long ago, that people were saying, that although it was theoretically possible, it wouldn't be viable for a very long time, due to cost, complexity/hardware requirements, power consumption etc.
When it arrives, and I think it will, much sooner than everyone expects, I think it will be a real wake-up moment, that we're sleepwalking along whilst the most astonishing revolution is happening right under our noses. It will be the most 'real' proof of the exponential growth in computing power that has been going on since the seventies.
And it will continue. Where will we be in 40 years time?
It's probably not that far away. My dual 3090 set up can already render path trading pretty much in real time with denoising if there isn't much bounce lighting (i.e viewing an object by itself with no environment).
Nvidia has shown off some pretty crazy real time rendering stuff on their omniverse platform.
Rock solid and clear description, you are good teacher . Added bonus I now know where noise comes from!
Yeah, an enlightening explanation
Cool stuff, thanks for the update.
Well explained video done in a short amount of time. Great work, looking forward to path guiding.
Well explained. Thanks for the update.
thanks for the info man!
I feel so smart now, because I saw the experimental build available for download in my blender launcher a few days ago and already googled the whole ordeal. Very exciting stuff! I‘d love to finally start using more volumes in my scenes without everything turning to noise
Great video - very cool info! 👍👍
Thank you for your always informative straightforward videos. Great choice of Bar B Q sauce too!
Sounds pretty kewl! I see why you're excited. It's heading in a great direction. I have never liked the idea of randomness in these things, this makes more sense. It will be interesting once it is implemented using the GPU etc... should lead to some interesting renders!
I've been playing around with this a lot. Perceptually, it gives the appearance of about 5x the sample count in areas of the image where it is most effective. There are two scenarios where it works best: scenes where light must pass through a hole, such as car headlights or building interiors, and in scenes with lots of light falloff, such as those using spotlights and directional area lights.
That makes sense because those examples are exactly the sort of difficult lighting scenario that path guiding aims to solve.
great feature ..thanks a lot for the explaining
Thnx for this! Amazing!
this spuds awesome!!! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing this news, I had no idea this was coming. I read about path guiding a few weeks ago!
i tried the path guiding, i will try it with different types of files, haven't got that benefit yet, but will look forward to your next videos, the future is bright with Blender. good to see you excited about it :O)
Can't wait for it to come to the stable build! Thanks for bringing this update to my attention!
Thank you mate, i didn't heard about this just up untill now.
Its gonna be a game changers
Great explanation
Just talking and no visuals and you managed to make us understand volumes! great content!!!!!!
EXCITING!
You explained this beautifully! I am so interested in where this is going.
Hi, Just want to say THANK YOU!! My collegue and I use Renderman, and we were interested where this feature is located in our renderer. We found it, and tested with a few scenes where this feature would be needed. WOW!! It is subtle, but still every little bit helps. I found that it really helps with mesh lights.. especially since you really need to know where you rays are coming from in situations like that. Shoo!!! firefly be gone!!!
Freezing cold tea is awesome - especially when you leave the tea bag in overnight !
Thank you Rob... you are a great teacher 🐻👍
Cycles X was indeed a huge jump, look forward to this being standard
Tomas Muller is also a great footballer. What a legend lol
Yeah really waiting for this one as well. Little mmiffed it;s CPU only atm, but I don't use anything except the stable releases anyway. So i figure by the time 3.4 is in stable, GPU should (hopefuly) be in. Will be really nice though esp for more sparse dramatic lighting. Having the samples go where they are needed most is soooooo crucial.
Yeah it's pretty useless in my tests right now. It actually increases render times more often than not. But once it gets fully implemented I'm expecting a 30%+ reduction in frame times.
There's something more in progress... The GPU accelerated ODIN denoiser ..
Oh boy! I can't wait! "It's CPU only at the moment" Oh boy! I can definitely wait!
Why didn't I think about including barbecue sauce in my computer setup? So jealous!
Very exciting news!
Yep Looking forward to this. render time is of highest importnce to everyone
best explanation of fireflies ive ever seen, so fast and so perfect
Glad it's using cpu, most of the good stuff added lately is gpu only and unfortunately that's not helping me.
I'm stuck using a very old computer pushed to the limits. New computer is so far away from being a option that I don't even look anymore.
This'll be a big help for people rendering on CPU.
amazing news... so cool
I wish I could work as quickly as my GPU renders these days
Even faster than cycles x... at this rate Cycles X will be a realtime pathtracer haha
we're used to cycles massive updates... there's one at each blender version :P
THINGS GONNA GO CRAZY
was hoping you would demo it for us! any videos online showing this in action? haven't found one yet
Blender's implementation is still very much a work in progress, so there's isn't really anything to show at the moment. You can activate it with the beta build of blender just by enabling a checkbox in the render settings - but it isn't really any faster in most scenes right now.
If you want to see how powerful path guiding can be, check out the intel article that I've linked in the description. There's some good examples there of path guiding massively cleaning up noise.
Unfortunately it looks like it'll be CPU only for the blender 3.4 release, so we'll have to stick with using the janky "portal" area lights for interior scenes
Apparently VFX pros are mainly using CPUs for renders, not GPUs, according to Blender Bob. They tend to use very heavy meshes, and GPUs tend to run out of RAM.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 not a vfx pro but i did create a very heavy scene, I'd always run out of VRAM so I used CPU which did fix the issue since most of the building data was going to the RAM and Not VRAM
There's already a 3.4 branch with path guiding (but only for CPU rendering atm). Gonna test it now :D
MMM Tea with a Sweet Baby Ray's chaser
Oooh, cold tea; my favourite.
Cold English tea I can just about get away with. Cold (strong) raspberry green tea? Not so much.
Sounds great. I tested this with the classroom benchmark but didn't see any improvement. So looks like we'll have to wait a bit more to rip the benefits.
Don't talk yourself down! I'd rather hear the news and get your opinion than anyone else about Blender News!
Thanks. I'm not talking myself down. It's just not really what I intend this channel to be.
As an archviz artist, of course render time is important to me. But not that much finally. I know how to manage my time to hold the deadlines for my clients and I know my workstation well. In many years using Blender though, I never ever see people talking about "realism". Like everybody's using Blender because it's free and renderings don't take forever.
But the more Blender progresses (and it does) the more I see that they put all their efforts on the user experience and nothing else. Which is kinda sad. Everytime some new features happen to Cycle it's all about the rendering time and never about the realism. I began to work with Vray and Corona some weeks ago on colleagues workstations and it's clearly day and night. Yes these are extremely pricey softwares, yes they're tedious, but at one point what I want to achieve is pure realism which is impossible with Cycles.
I really hope that one day they gonna upgrade Cycles, go further than the path tracing they use and so on, work on lightings, real caustics (3.2 caustics are kind of meh), better glass and all these stuffs. Maybe I ask to much though and Blender isn't for me anymore.
You have no idea what you're talking about, improve your skill! I've seen thousands of archviz renders that look extremely realistic and is rendered in cycles. I bet if you use vray your renders would still look like crap
@@ageneral007 First calm down little boy. Where do you think you are? Secondly, archviz is my job and maybe YOU don't know what you're talking about. There's realism and then there's Realism. Of course we all can achieve amazing things with Blender but at one point, some softwares are limited. All companies I'm working for or with are not using Vray or Corona because "yeah you know it's part of a workflow" and blah blah... In my domain they don't care about this. Artists I know are even allowed to use whatever they want from the time the job is done. I'm not an Artstation freelancer I'm a professional. When there's a 20M$ or more project and the promoter must sell it to a city or other important clients you want perfection and nothing else. Being a great artist making great stuffs on Blender in your bedroom like a lot of people is not enough on big projects. That's two different worlds. I love Blender, I learned a lot on it, I earned a fair amount of money with it and I'll still using it for quick and personnal projects I'm making for fun and posting here and there. But now I'm fortunate enough to switch for even bigger projects. I hope you'll get there one day. But I'm afraid you won't with this state of mind.... ;)
@@IronLordFitness first of all, I've been using using blender for the past 3 years now, and I eventually switched to 3dsmax few months ago, I still use blender daily, and I will still repeat this again! I've seen vray, corona quality result being achieved with blender cycles, The archviz companies have built their pipeline on a certain software for many years which means a lot of scripts, modifications etc would have been built on the software, the reason why you think cycles can't is because you haven't seen it, a lot of blender artists are self taught which means most of the works you'd see would be a fairly decent renders often, o. The other hand 3ds max is a paid software, and most of the people using it are industry professionals, which means they are outputting industry professional stuff, it's not impossible to get vray result in cycles, you just have to put the damn work! I'd send you a link to video, you'd try to guess the cycles renders out of the images displayed on the screen, let see if you can distinguish between cycles and the other engines!
ua-cam.com/video/_zAtUzSEpVk/v-deo.html
I'm a VFX comper by trade that extended his skillset with 3D some 2 years ago using Blender. I also have the same nagging feel that Corona or Vray renders look a hell of a lot better right out the box. I've been unsure about whether this has to do with my lack of experience or not well enough trained eye, but your assessment practically clears it up for me. We all know the awesomeness Blender can produce, but it appears that i.e. Corona is a lot more reliable and requires less hacks and tweaking. A colleague buddy of mine has about the same 3D experience as me but in C4D, yet it's always surprising to me what he churns out, especially with realism.
What da bbq sauce doin
Sounds very promising, thanks for sharing, I wonder by how much this will actually decrease render times..like will we gain about x5 faster renders or even x10 or x20? no idea but it sounds real good anyway.
uploaded 8 seconds ago wtf xD didn't even click the notification
I hype for stuff like this like I used to hype for games years ago
Hell yeah
There is a faster way of doing it - I need to find whatever forum these programmers are on as they are working the solution backwards which leads to noise, errors and flickering illumination.
Is that mic unplugged? I see a hanging xlr. And it is quite pretty, BTW. Oh, and that's really GREAT news!
The mic uses USB C. But it's an old stand that has a fixed XLR cable. I'll probably cut the cable at some point, but it can't be removed otherwise.
I'm more interested in the improvements to the new principled shader. Blender PS is still behind Arnold Standard Surface/Corona material/Vray mtl/Octane/etc.
The principle v2 is under development.
Blender goes Woaaahh
👍👍👍
Blender keeps blessing us with great features. However, what I personally want to see is light linking, Vulkan support, and hardware support for AMD GPU's hardware ray tracing. I believe all three of those things are on the roadmap and confirmed to be coming, eventually.
Neat this should help Kcycles out a good bit. Unless it already has it... Kcycles is what Cycles should be honestly but that is my opinion.
crack me open a cold one cause this is EXCITING
Thanks for the video! Do you have any information on when GPU support will be included? CPU-only seems to be quite useless, since rendering with GPU without openPGL is probably still faster, i guess? (of course in some cases like caustics it may be worth it to render slower with CPU-only path guiding for realistic light but for other cases the speed improvement will be the only benefit and this is irrelevant without GPU support)
I can't find any development schedule on OpenPGL
There's no known deadline, as far as I know. All I can say is that it's coming, and I assume it's a priority.
@@DECODEDVFX Thank you!
I noticed you're celebrating with our favorite sauce. 😂
Hi, do you think this will also improve caustics in Blender?
Yes.
Cant wait for this to be usable with GPU
I wish they would find a way to optimize cycles more tbh. Arnold hardly uses GPU and denoises very quickly in viewport. Cycles uses so much GPU and takes a bit to denoise in viewport. Same can be said for rendering.
I'm finding the same. I'm coming from Arnold and Cycles is disappointing on my 3090ti.
q. does this replace light portals?
I think then there is only Light Linking missing, right?
Bought Marmoset Toolbag a couple of days ago, your video is kinda making me regret it a little, maybe, but not really
I've never used Marmoset but it looks great
@@DECODEDVFX Ya its a fantastic baker and now a very capable texture painter taking aim at Substance. People often buy it for its renderer alone though.
I hear a Sound 🙏❣💭🖖
p.s. your are part of Intel test group...?
Nope
Barbeque Sauce
give cape
sorry to comment on a 2 month old vid, but the question is regarding to the topic. Do I need to run Cycles X to use pathtracing? How does cycles x contribute to blender 3.4, is it native, or do I have to download it extra from the net?
Thanks
CyclesX was just the project name for the code rewrite of Cycles. If you're using Blender 3.0 or later, then you are using CyclesX.
Can you answer me this? Why does blender struggle so much with volumetrics and unreal engine can handle it a doddle in real time? Same with meshes. Blender struggles with large vert counts and unreal can handle it a breeze yet essentially they are very similar things.
Blender can do real time volumetrics using Eevee. Real time raytraced volumes are much more complex using cycles. As for poly counts, blender could also handle massive amounts of verts if it only had to display them in the scene like unreal - but in blender all of those meshes have to be editable. You can't edit objects in unreal.
in short, Cycles is physically correct and even more, unbiased (infinite precision in infinite render time), other cheating. Nothing new.
Will path guiding also open the path to light linking in cycles?
No, that's a separate issue.
the feature I'm missing the most 😭
I have little hope with Blender. It's so slow at everything. If it works at all. I get SO many GPU render fails. Constantly having to cut back my scene. Upgraded to 64gb RAM recently and it's only enough to stop it crashing, really I need 128gb.
Tru I haven't had this issue. Are you using an Nvidia gpu? If it is a bug u should report it and then it will get fixed
Adding RAM won't help you with rendering on the GPU, if you don't use a system with unified memory.
ok perfect timing when i upgrade to CORE I9 AND RTX 4000 SERIES
If blender have integration of Mitsuba 3 I be so happy. But if Cycles get BDPT VCM + PSSMLT or specular manifold sampling I be even more happy. And when they finally gonna add attenuation distance? (homogeneous medium density, blender only have hm scattering).
How long will it take to get path guiding in GPU ?.
At the moment for me it has no use, until its available on the GPU. since i could just render without path-guiding on the GPU for the same amount of time and get a brute force cleaner render. But its going to be fantastic when it does become available on the GPU... If it does not come to GPU then i would consider buying the most powerful consumer GPU and just keeping this basic GTX 1070 GPU.
I'm on a 3090ti and Cycles isn't as fast on it as I was expecting.
that sounds very exciting. A few years ago I learned a little bit about rendering algorithms in university. But I do not know what path guiding is. I wonder how that relates to algorithms like metropolis light transport (MLT). Because MLT is also about reusing interesting lightpaths and slightly modifying them rather than constructing a new light path from scratch all the time. I have also heard of an algorithm that is called Energy Redistribution Path Tracing, which also seems to be in this category of reusing interesting light paths. And also the technique explained in this video seems to be about reusing interesting directions: ua-cam.com/video/gsZiJeaMO48/v-deo.html
It would be interesting if someone could do an overview video of how all of those "reusing interesting light paths"-algorithms relate to each other and what are the differences between those techniques.
Might be a daft question but why not start these paths from the light source? I mean, blender know exactly where all the light sources are? Why start firing them off in random directions hoping they hit a light source by chance? I'm probably missing something.
I already replied to this but it disappeared for some reason. Long story short, most rays from the light wouldn't ever reach the camera.
It's the same issue that path guiding aims to fix but on a much worse scale. You'd be calculating loads of rays that never impact the final tender.
Cycles is an unbiased renderer. It doesn't bias light rays (they're random). You're describing biased rendering, which was the norm for decades, but the industry moved away from it because unbiased rendering is more realistic.
Is it something like Lumin in Unreal?
sounds a bit like the lightcache, vray uses as a prepass.. for 10 Years ore more
Is this going to ba available for Mac's
I don't know for sure, but I think it'll be available on all supported render devices eventually.
Nothing more to add
😄😄😄
At 3:52 you are touching your voluminous hair. If you had not done that i would not have watched for it .-). Maybe you can take a cap in videos, if you do not like your hair growing down instead of up? :-)
I wish Blender would improve physics to make it like what we see in 3 Minute Papers.
Physics nodes are coming in a year or so.
@@DECODEDVFX I’m sure you are aware of the UA-cam channel 3 Minute Papers. If not, I recommend watching it because it is very insightful and makes wonder when all of those physics capabilities will be implemented in Blender and other 3D software. Your channel is so informative by the way. Thank you.
@@kangsan2014 I assume you mean 2 minute papers. And yes, I watch it religiously.
@@DECODEDVFX sorry, I forgot it was 2 minute papers. Lol yep!
sound sort of vaguely like Nvidias denoising in Daz works, from the explanation anyway, it makes surrounding pixels similarish to the one it did trace to fill the scene, and then when you let it run longer, it will add in more and more exact rays so to speak which results in more detail, but you can get a reasonable noiseless picture quite quickly
I really don't know exactly how it works in Daz, just that the description sort of fits
Nope
Denoising is a post-processing effect done on a rendered image. Path guiding is for light rays moving in 3d space.
First (sorry, first time this happened to me)
I'm not sold on this. We went towards unbiased renderers because they look more real, now we're going back to biased rendering to save time? How do we know this isn't just regressing into plastic '90s CGI?
Dude who cares? If anyone does an update feature in Blender, I’m glad to see it from you and anyone else, I like to see everyone's point of view. Please do something like this. Thank you.
They should find a way to support OpenGL again, or an option to use legacy cycles instead of cycles x. It sucks how many addons are for 3.+ that won’t support 2.93
Bro, just use an older version until you buy another GPU (they are dirty cheap right now in Aliexpress).
cycles is an addon, try to copy cycles from previous blender maybe that will work.
My usual workaround is to make the project with 2.9x then render it with the latest build.
@@dokerb3d60 Never thought of this. I’m going to try it, hopefully it works
@@DECODEDVFX I get what you mean, thank for the comment
Blender is such a tool with great potential, but it will never be exclusive for such a new render engine technology. So, I think they should put all the effort into that shit UI. For gods sake, even the archaic 3DS Max can be better.
I think you need to read up on path tracing. Its FAR from new, invented in 1986, First used for GI in 2002, and has been part of the Arnold renderer since like 2006!!
I never said that path tracing is new.
there is nothing new there, the way you sell it is like some new unheard of thing(path guiding it's just a name), it sound to me like light cache vray has it, and Redshift too, vray invented it, Arnold that is a legit forward renderer didn't took that path, Octane too(both are unbiased renderers for me they give the most impressive results in terms of look), for them it still a compromise, it doesn't produce the best image possible, and Octane is the fastest GPU renderer on the market .. it's good that some new stuff comes to Blender, faster render times for Cycles is a good thing, Cycles is not an unbiased render, so if it can use very trick possible to get the final image why not
Light caching is more like what Blender called approximate GI. It's a different thing from path guiding.
@@DECODEDVFX Fast GI is based on AO, it's still rudimentary, and it's for the viewport(not the final render) and nobody use it in Blender, pathguiding again the way you describe it is light cache, i remember 5 years ago, when i was using vray, when you use light cache, you could literally see the point of importance map drawn on the screen, before the final pass, Redshift has a way also to see that map(i don't remember how you do that but Greyscalegorilla have a video on their channel showing how it's works ), the difference is the placement of your camera and your lightsources, AO is just AO it's relate back to gameengine decades ago(it has no idea where the lights sources are), that why the lightcache map should be calculated everytime, in Vray you can save it, if you don't change your camera placement and your lights, like all Yutubers you shoot above your paygrade, "i don't normally do videos on this, unless it's very important" .. just shut up dude it's ok to give info just don't glorify yourself
@@KaoukabiJaouad path guiding is not light caching. I'll say it again. Light caching is not path guiding.
@@DECODEDVFX then do a video explaining the difference between lightcache, and pathguiding ? like i said the way describe it it's lightcache, do a video explaining the difference between light cache and path guiding, the difference between you and me, is i don't act like i know more than the limit of my knowledge, you already made a blunder, you said Fast GI is comparable to light cache which is laughable, in my opinion Cycles cannot reinvent the wheel, lightcache was in vray for a long time and vray is the oldest renderer out there(the most robust by far light years ahead of any other render engine), Redshift took the tricks they found and implemented it also in their render engine, Cycles can't just come out of nowhere and have something completely unheard of, like i said be humble , that what annoyed me in your video
@@KaoukabiJaouad 🤦
They're going to add a lot of great stuff to cycles, it's going to be super powerful ....
.... but my renders will always suck!