Had some r&d time lately, at work and at home. Here’s what I’m up to:
I’d like to get the node system hooked up to raytracing, allowing one to do advanced shading techniques but without being forced to do it with the dodgy ‘mixing materials’ method. As a starting point, I’ve made a reflection node – the bonus is that the node system makes it a lot easier to texturise inputs. Thanks to some hints from Alfredo de Greef, I’ve added an additional input to rotate the anisotropic direction (with black being 0° and white being 360°). This can give some nice effects:
- Radial blend texture (node setup)
- Spun-brushed steel (node setup same as above but using this texture instead)
- Carbon fibre (node setup)
- Weird sphere (using a clouds texture for aniso rotation)
I’d also like to include a refract node, an AO node, and/or also a general purpose raytrace node that takes a *vector and *solid angle as input, and gives as output: *whether it intersected something (average of samples in solid angle) *distance to intersection, *shaded colour of intersected face, etc.
At the studio we might possibly be doing a project that would involve vfx/image based lighting. It’s Christmas soon and there are plenty of shiny balls around, so I got a nice one and we’ve started making some HDRI light probes. Blender’s brute force method of doing image based lighting by evenly sampling the hemisphere in AO gives reasonable results, but it’s too slow for animation.
I’ve been looking into a technique originally devised for realtime graphics, based on the paper An Efficient Representation for Irradiance Environment Maps. It works by storing the irradiance in the map in spherical harmonics coefficients and only supports lambert diffuse shading, but it’s extremely fast, and can give quite nice results especially combined with it in an AO source, or even just humble buffer shadows. I’ve done some tests so far with Paul Debevec’s free light probes
- Beach
- Campus
- Grace Cathedral
- and the stairwell at work 😉
Rather than shoehorning it into AO, I’ve so far got a separate Image Based Lighting panel with this in it, and perhaps some other kinds of importance sampling methods later on.
Hi Matt, this is good news.
Keep it up,
— Rui —
beautiful stuff.
That is great stuff!!!
Love the brushed metal.
I think you beat the record for “number of words I don’t understand in 1 post”, but the pictures are pretty! 🙂
As usual, some very nice work. Thanks!
Wow – so much to digest! Definitely stuff to discuss over beer. 😀
Cheers, Mate.
Paul C
Hey dudes, glad you find it interesting 🙂 Did some more tests mixing two raytrace nodes (one sharp, one blurry) based on angle to the camera: http://mke3.net/blender/devel/nodes/coated_glossy_carpaint.jpg
and Paul: yeah, we’re going to have to make some sort of rendezvous 🙂
The image based lighting tests seems very nice. How much faster it is? Will there be available some test build with new image-lighting panels?
Thank you very much for your good work!!!
JiriH, the diffuse shading itself is very fast. Apart from a second or two pre-filtering the light probe before rendering, there’s no noticeable speed delay at all.
But! That’s diffuse shading only, like the example images on the website I linked to. If you want shadows, you’ll have to combine the technique with AO (though you can still use the filtered light probe to generate the AO colours) or by manually placing lamps. I think this is acceptable, given how fast it is.
Thank you for your reply. This could be really very helpful for area lighted animation such as Peach project 🙂 Thank you for all your researches.
Hi Matt,
nice results of your work. I’m just curious, who JiriH is … its not me … I hope 🙂
Jiri is not schizo (hopefully)
So which one of you is Brad Pitt and which one is Ed Norton? 😉
w00t, this is like a dream(pleaase someone poke me, i really want this to be true!) dO_Ob
Brad Pitt or Ed Norton? … no clue, but I try to sell many luxury soaps … best quality and very good price ;-).
Wow!
This stuff looks great Matt.
All these nodes are really cool.
I also enjoyed your work you posted
in Blenderartists.
Keep up the fantastic work!
Matt if you don’t make a patch soon im going to run down to Sydney and strangle you 😛
Matt, you rock. Creating render techniques based on scientific papers. That carbon fiber looks so beautiful. I can’t even get soft shadows out of the blender renderer. I wish I felt smarter at this very moment.
Matt, I knew there was a reason I favorited your blog! Holy smokes that’s awesome! When you do the docs for this could you include the test .blend files? Also could you post the node setup for the cloud sphere?
Great stuff Matt 🙂
Correct me if I’m wrong, but some of those nodes look custom to me (Reflect) is that something that one can patch in, is it hidden or what?
Ah, one should read the WHOLE post before commenting… ;P
Hi!
I would like extend my SQL experience.
I red that many SQL books and would like to
get more about SQL for my position as db2 database manager.
What can you recommend?
Thanks,
Werutz
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