Messages

16

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-18, 21:56:32 »

Well, of course. I started with cryengine and back in 2010 I made the gifs attached as part of my research to achieve 3d motion blur, 3d (not post process) depth of field with bokeh, area shadows and other things in cryengine.
I'm still using the old cryengine from 2007. From time to time I check to see what's new in newer versions of cryengine, but it seems they still don't have what I need.
For me equally important would be not only the rendering but the workflow too, and it seems even though so incredibly old, cryengine 2007 had some very good tools built in for nature building and easy objects painting and management and dynamics. Plus it's similar with 3ds max.

But I think with a few more upgrades, the new Unreal will be hard to pass, and could be worth switching to as a new contender app for nature building.
........
old cryengine gifs and pics (some of them very low res - because they are animated)

3d motion blur,
you could have long distance objects drawing and shadows even in 2007,
nice dynamic vegetation and particles.

17

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-18, 00:23:51 »

What's that got to do with anything ?

I only know c4d from youtube tutorials, but it's a program like Maya and 3ds max. While we were talking about Unreal or so called "real-time" programs, or game editors. Right now they are still called game editors, but I suspect in the future they will become more generalized.

I also know c4d has a nice third-party real-time renderer. Maybe similar with Eevee from Blender ?

18

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-17, 17:02:03 »

Material Creation is arguably better overall in unreal though it does mix some key features.

Maybe better as in a nicer interface with lots of options - compared to our aging Slate, but I tried to create a simple material double sided for a nice leaf shader, following multiple video tutorials, and after an hour of trying I couldn't do it. It just didn't work as it should. Maybe it doesn't work well in Unreal 5 ? The reflection or even specular did not work properly, same with translucency.
No to mention stupid parts like - needing to constantly press Apply or Save in order to show the changes on the model ? That's worse than in 3ds max or 2007 cryengine.

I also tried both Lumen and Raytracing, even though people said that ray tracing doesn't work in Unreal 5, I managed to make it work, after jumping through a lot of hoops. Real-time raytracing looks nice, with raytraced AO instead of of Screen-space AO but somehow it doesn't look correct. It looks better than a normal video game lighting solution, but not correct. Same with the Lumen.

Also for a much lauded program which aims at environment creation it seems it missing some basic things. For example in 3ds max and cryengine you can just select an object, go 1 kilometer away on that other mountain and press a key and the selected object will "teleport" and snap to where you clicked the mouse. Unreal seems it doesn't have this functionality.

You can probably get nice results with Unreal, but you will probably have to fight with the program a lot and have to learn a lot of new things.

19

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-11, 00:46:54 »

From what I studied, so far Chaos Vantage has some limitations for video rendering or production. But I did not installed it so maybe I'm not that well informed.

It also has graphical limitations like fog and vdb. I think.

20

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-10, 14:58:23 »

I think if we are talking about a potential vray replacement, only an image like this would be acceptable. It would not need to be real-time. So far Lumen doesn't have these kind of contact sharp shadows if the area light is large.

Hopefully the raytrace solution has this kind of quality.

21

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-10, 00:46:44 »

so for now 5 is as good for archviz as 4. no time to lose, just dive in.

Yeah but unreal 5 has that "infinite" polygon technology.

There's also a very fast pathtracer you can activate from a menu, but from what I've read that is only a tool to establish the "ground truth" or how a scene is supposed to look, and you can't render a video with that, which I think it's stupid, since it's so fast.

Perhaps a good workflow would be to work with Lumen which is real-time but only an approximation and then to switch to raytrace for the final result. And it would be nice if you could easily switch back and forth between these without needing to restart the engine.
And it would be also nice if you could adjust Lumen and raytrace to be a close match - lighting wise.

22

General CG Discussion / Re: Why do my renders suck so much when viewed on my phone?

« on: 2021-06-08, 21:29:17 »

So it's the luck of the draw ? What's the explanation for my 5 year old oled phone ?

But maybe in that case the solution is simple, I think someone here said you could take an extended warranty which hopefully will cover dead pixels and burn-in, and it could still be cheaper than an oled computer monitor.

23

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-08, 18:25:36 »

But still, I think in theory the new Unreal 5 should be able to deliver a quality similar to a path-tracer, because how it is now it's like 90% there and delivered with 30 frames per sec. Surely if you would heavily increase the quality so it will render one frame in like a minute as opposed to in 0.033 seconds - the quality should be almost up there.
It's just that I couldn't find those console vars for that. Maybe someone else who knows Unreal could chime in.

The advantage would be that you could work in that 90% quality which would make the workflow very nice, being able to see the lighting, render, shadows in an almost final form, and you would increase the quality only for the final renders.

But I found even more drawbacks. The new Unreal with its "infinite" like polygons and nanite doesn't work for foliage and things that move, like leafs and plants. That's why they used that demo with only rocks and buildings. For a jungle and 95% foliage scene like it's in my thumbnail it would work, just without those optimizations.

24

General CG Discussion / Re: Why do my renders suck so much when viewed on my phone?

« on: 2021-06-07, 20:48:15 »

What do you think about buying a small OLED TV for monitor usage ? For price reasons, because they are much cheaper than an oled monitor, and even though TV - they are still OLED.

The mini-LED technology sounds good on paper and maybe if you use it for casual viewing, but I feel any technology with FALD no matter how many leds they have behind, can have certain artifacts. Like in the new ipads - the shadow around the margin, and the bloom. Even though it can be a subtle bloom, these things might not matter for consumers, but I can sit sometimes even half an hour to adjust just the bloom layers on an image or video I make. So how can I trust a monitor with "built-in" bloom effect, no matter how subtle ?

I had that concern with burn-in and color degradation, but I have 2 phones with oled displays, one of them is very old, maybe 5 years old and has absolutely no burn in anywhere. And it was used pretty often.
Maybe I will have the same luck with an OLED TV ? A new oled tv should be even better/safer compared to a 5 year old phone.

25

General CG Discussion / Re: UNreal 5

« on: 2021-06-07, 20:25:34 »

I tried to find more informations on youtube videos and on their documentation, about their new real-time Lumen GI and lighting.
By default the quality is not high enough, you don't have proper contact shadows, the soft shadows seem only an approximation of the real thing. But maybe just like in cryengine, you can increase the quality with CVARS, even if you will get 1 frame per second, but from what I've looked so far, it seems it's not there.

Of course you can't see the problems if you have a heavy busy textured terrain, but with a white or gray interior, the lack of quality becomes visible.

26

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: The most wanted feature?

« on: 2021-03-24, 21:10:10 »

Does it even matter now, when you can't buy any GPU without selling your kidney?

Maybe it will matter for the future (in the future).

27

[Max] I need help! / Re: VFB + Render image

« on: 2021-01-03, 05:54:02 »

"1- render outputs don't look clear1 it always has noise"

If it's not clear, the resolution is probably too low. If it has noise, there's not much you can do, but just need to let it render more hours. You need a strong CPU.. Or maybe you can read on Corona help website for some optimizations. But you shouldn't change render settings as those have almost no impact on render times.

"2- VFB disappeared"  - this one is not very clear. Maybe you can post some pictures for problem nr 1 and 2, so you'll be able to get better help.

28

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2020-10-14, 17:27:44 »

Where does it say on the blog it could be node based ?
But node based are not that scary, and you could do more things with nodes and it can be actually more intuitive than layer based. Or maybe it could be in both options, like Combustion was.
And you could arrange the nodes to resemble the arrangements of typical layers. So there, now it looks just like layers:

OH NO NOT NODE BASED PLEASE!!!

29

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: New rendering technology Ours (Biased)

« on: 2020-10-04, 13:59:59 »

Especially the part with the super fast caustics.

30

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: The most wanted feature?

« on: 2020-09-29, 01:32:42 »

About a year ago I did an animation test with Corona. Not sure what version it was but probably already had the adaptive engine.

It had a very pleasant... I don't know what, lighting ? colors ? It was pleasant everything. Even though it was a simple plane, a little bit of corona sky behind and a small animated object. Fixed camera. And I was a little troubled to see that the speed of rendering of just the empty plane ground and the sky was not much different if I added the object in or not. I felt like the speed of the empty scene should have been much much faster.
  It felt stupid for me to wait for the renderer to render 1000 frames which were all identical between them save for the little bit of moving render noise or grain and 25% of the image occupied by the animated object.
  So I managed to animate a small render region just for the animated object and of course that went way faster.

Then I saw here on forum other people with the same problem, I even tried replying that they can also use this method - animating a small render region to follow the moving object, but they were not interested, they were just upset that Corona takes that much time to render a static simple scene or a large plane.

I also tested a few other renderers, I don't remember which ones, maybe even IRay ? Not sure, but some renderers, like one would expect, had a much greater speed increase if you had the animated object in the scene, or not. Also a great speed increase for the portions of the scene without details, if it used bucket rendering you could see the increase in speed.