Olivier Boscournu is the
winner of the Render of the Week Award for the week of May 14, 2012. June 4, 2012 12:40 AM by Olivier Boscournu
Blender is a free 3D software package and
is ideal for small studios or freelance CG artists who need to provide
cost-effective and quality 3D renders. Still in development, the new
Cycles render engine has been integrated since the 2.61 version, with GI render
and GPU support. Still young, it offers a Pathtracing method which is very
effective for outdoor rendering or a render for open stages where light spreads
easily. For interior renderings, I usually
work with Yafaray, which is very easy to configure and offers several lighting
solutions, but it only calculates with CPU. I named this picture
"Bidirectional Interior," because it was rendered with the
Bidirectional Pathtracing method of Yafaray. Having never tried this, I decided
to test it to see its performance. This unbiased solution is relatively slow, even if we take it into account that it's being rendered just by CPU. I also wanted to compare the
Blender Internal to check if it's able to perform for an indoor scene. Blender Internal With no add-on required and easy
to use, it's more ideal for beginners. It's suitable for product/studio
rendering, similar to Direct Lighting of Yafaray and Cycles, where Global
Illumination and light bounces are not useful. To accentuate the realistic, BI
offers two solutions for ambient occlusion, an approximate and raytraced one.
The latter is a little bit slower but is also more precise, it is this that I
used for this scene. The materials are typically configured, without going
through the nodes but by using multiple channels and different textures. Two
lights illuminate the room, a lamp into the lamp and an area on the right to
simulate the light from a window. It is important to increase the samples of
lamps for soft shadows. The more complicated with the internal is to simulate
the bounce light. Fortunately, it is possible to make many different passes that are very useful in post-production. Yafaray 0.1.2
My favorite! Its greatest
advantage is the ease of use in configuring the engine and materials. The speed
of Photon Mapping is quite impressive, and the Direct Light method is faster
than that of BI. Six different shaders seem to be short but you can configure
most of the needed materials for an interior rendering. For me, Yafaray is a
free "Vray" even if it doesn't provide as many render passes. Cycles
I use Cycles very rarely, except
for projects involving furniture design, where the
real-time preview is very practical. Unbiased calculation is rather long with
the CPU, so it is imperative to have a good GPU, preferably with Nvidia Cuda,
to take full advantage of the acceleration to reduce the rendering time
significantly. The materials are configured with the nodes that allow a great
flexibility in the creation of complex shaders. Conclusion So, my observation is ....
Other than Yafaray, Olivier has
succeeded in duplicating his convincing "Bidirectional Interior with
Yafaray" scene in BI and Cycles as well.
What difference did he discover
in using all these Blender's three major render engine?
Olivier has the
following observation to share.
The following article may not reflect the
official view of www.BlenderNews.org.—Editor in Chief.
