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Real-time rendering goodness...
Aug. 15th, 2011 01:09 pmBlender, the 3D modelling, texturing, rendering, etc., software I use is in the process of having its rendering engine replaced.
The new rendering engine, called Cycles, is an "Unbiased" rendering engine versus the old "Biased" rendering engine (a quick definition doesn't seem forthcoming in the wilds of the web, but suffice it to say that Unbiased starts with a poor approximation and constantly refines it, while Biased makes a set of initial guesses that it never questions again), and supports hardware acceleration on nVidia CUDA-capable video cards, even allowing interactive rendering while the user is editing the scene.
Unfortunately, I'm using an ATI video card that only supports OpenCL, so I can't take advantage of this until the developers add support, which means that my render times will still be fairly long.
Anyway, the new Cycles engine won't be included in Blender for a few months yet, as it needs to support almost everything the current rendering engine has, as well as (I hope) support for ATI cards.
For now, though, it's enough to be able to play around with a new rendering engine and see what neat and interesting things you can make with them, especially with such realistic lighting.
There is an example in my DA gallery of how nicely the new engine works:
Those are two copies of "Suzanne", the official Blender mascot, with different textures and a light-emitting plane above them.
The new rendering engine, called Cycles, is an "Unbiased" rendering engine versus the old "Biased" rendering engine (a quick definition doesn't seem forthcoming in the wilds of the web, but suffice it to say that Unbiased starts with a poor approximation and constantly refines it, while Biased makes a set of initial guesses that it never questions again), and supports hardware acceleration on nVidia CUDA-capable video cards, even allowing interactive rendering while the user is editing the scene.
Unfortunately, I'm using an ATI video card that only supports OpenCL, so I can't take advantage of this until the developers add support, which means that my render times will still be fairly long.
Anyway, the new Cycles engine won't be included in Blender for a few months yet, as it needs to support almost everything the current rendering engine has, as well as (I hope) support for ATI cards.
For now, though, it's enough to be able to play around with a new rendering engine and see what neat and interesting things you can make with them, especially with such realistic lighting.
There is an example in my DA gallery of how nicely the new engine works:
Those are two copies of "Suzanne", the official Blender mascot, with different textures and a light-emitting plane above them.
