It’s been a little while since I merged the volume rendering work into Blender 2.5 but I’ve been steadily poking away at it since. Today I committed some lighting features, support for volumes receiving external shadows (raytraced, and quick but more limited shadow mapped) and a new shadow only mode that’s a bit faster than self-shading, good for less dense volumes like fog or wispy smoke:
I’ve also had some behind-the-scenes help in the form of code review and some new features from Alfredo de Greef, which has been great, and last week I bit the bullet and redid part of the shading code. It was previously using a custom method left over from initial experiments that wasn’t entirely physically correct – the shader didn’t conserve energy. In the real world, if more light is scattered out of the volume, towards your eye, there will be less left to keep penetrating through the remainder of the volume, but the previous method didn’t account for this.
In reality this also applies on a wavelength-dependent basis too, if the media is such that the red light is scattered out of the volume (from an initial white light shining on it), all that’s left to continue through the rest of the volume is the inverse of that (roughly cyan). I got to work changing this in the code, but after a long time testing realised it was getting very difficult to control. Most of the time, if you’re making a coloured volume (like the excellent coloured smoke in the Cloudy trailer), you want to be able to just set a colour and be done with it. Doing it by tweaking wavelength dependent absorption and scattering was getting to be a real pain, so I ended up chopping and changing things around.
Now there’s a single physically based ‘scattering’ parameter, controlling the amount of light that’s scattered out of the volume (leaving less to continue through), as well as a ‘transmission colour’ that defines the result colour in the rest of the volume, after out-scattering and absorption. With these settings, by default, the shader works physically correctly. For ease of control though, I also added a ‘reflection’ colour and strength which basically acts as an RGB gain, tinting the out-scattered light. It’s more of a non-physical tweak, but it does make life a fair bit easier. I’ve documented these settings with example renders on the blender wiki.
I’m pretty happy with how it’s working now: physically correct by default, but with the option of changing it for artistic control, and philosophically I think that’s how it should be. One of the many things I dislike about Blender’s current shading system is that it generally starts out incorrect, and you have to really understand what’s going on, and work quite hard in order to make it do the right thing (energy conservation, obeying physical laws, etc.). Not only is this a real pain since you have to go through the same chores every time just to get a decent looking material, but for many people who don’t have a good understanding of how rendering/shading works (or should work!) they’re left with sub-par results since they don’t know what magic buttons to press. You should have to work to break it, not to get just a base level of correctness. In further work I do on shading/rendering, that’s going to be a large motivation, to get things working physically plausible by default, but with the ability to break the rules if the situation requires it.
Looking forward to trying all the new changes. I was already getting good results from the previous commit. Yeh for have to work to break the shader looking forward to what you are going to change.
Hey man!
could you post (or send some links) with information about blender shading/rendering system, and the techniques to get things done right?
so that people with no understanding (like me) of how rendering/shading works in blender can get some knowledge =]
thanks for everything!
bye!
Really cool documentation on the wiki page. Some really cool work you’ve done here.
cheers all
Hperigo: Most of it comes from experience (and reading the code!). Better to just fix the shading system. 🙂
hehehe i see..
Im in charge of the shading/rendering/rigging part in a commercial project, and most of the work is done in Blender. The quality of your work is such an inspiration!
Bye and thanks from Brazil!