Photos tagged 'cycles'

Pool Deck (Week 4) - Filmic Version From the second BlenderGuru Architecture...

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 22:19:13 GMT

Pool Deck (Week 4) - Filmic Version

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Comments and critique are very welcome.

4:25 hours to render @ 6,400 Samples, GPU

More rendering with Troy Sobotka's Filmic Blender. New balcony railing.

Before, there were quite defined limits based upon the original lighting.

With filmic blender much more range for correction in post is available.

[The 'bloom' on the pool was added in post; the reflections look iffy to me.]

Photo by mramshaw

Reading Room (Week 1) - Filmic Version From the second BlenderGuru...

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 20:31:08 GMT

Reading Room (Week 1) - Filmic Version

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Comments and critique are very welcome.

[Old software maxim: hardware is cheap, software is expensive]

2 hours to render @ 1,500 samples, GPU [Used to be 16 hours, CPU]

Interiors have extreme lighting so this seemed a good test for Filmic Blender.

You can get Troy Sobotka's Filmic Blender here:

-- https://github.com/sobotka/filmic-blender

I was quite pleased how much of the exterior detail was made available.

I adjusted the colour grade, no other changes. Trying for a wintry feel.

Impressively, Filmic Blender allows for a lot of post-processing.

The highlights can be pushed quite far without blowing-out.

[Check the shadow border, side face of the sofa which used to look a little nasty.]

I am sure the same is true for the shadows. A big thumbs-up from me.

Photo by mramshaw

Early Morning Mist with Blender, PLEASE VIEW LARGE [Click on the image to...

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 03:06:55 GMT

Early Morning Mist with Blender, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Approx. 2 hours to render @ 500 samples, CPU

Yet another BlenderGuru tutorial:

http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/make-grassy-meadow-scene/

The models & textures are supplied so the bulk of the exercise is Composition.

This is all related to the Grass Pack launch - which seems to be a very nice
improvement over grass created using Strands. The bonus of using models
is better-looking grass and greatly improved render time (and probably on
the GPU too, which really helps).

In this case, Volumetrics (the low-level early morning mist) is currently
only available with CPU rendering but even so I was pretty impressed with
how quickly this scene rendered. And not even a very high number of
of samples either! For the grass Particle System the numbers are pretty
reasonable also.

It's kind of fun de-constructing Nature - in this case my main goal was to
create realistic-looking mist - at which I think I was fairly successful. In
fact, I could probably have made the mist a lot denser - although that
really wasn't the look I was after.

Photo by mramshaw

Reading Room (Week 1) - Revised From the second BlenderGuru Architecture...

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 17:14:12 GMT

Reading Room (Week 1) - Revised

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Comments and critique are very welcome.

19 hours to render @ 1,500 samples, CPU

I have a much better understanding of Cycles (the render engine) than when
I rendered my first Week 1 attempt.

So it seemed like a good time to try re-rendering this particular scene.

I took to heart some critiques, plus made some changes I wanted to make.

Finally I added a small amount of 'bloom' in post (not photo-realistic but looks great).

This had the effect of creating a small amount of vignetting, which was welcome.

Photo by mramshaw

Pool Deck (Week 4) From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE...

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 22:53:15 GMT

Pool Deck (Week 4)

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Comments and critique are very welcome.

17:15 hours to render @ 1,600 Samples, CPU

Cycles may not be the fastest render engine, but it does a pretty nice job.

[It is apparently unbiased too, there are many settings to speed things up,
but these generally seem to introduce bias, trading speed for accuracy.]

Check out the nice bounce lighting at the base of the potted plants.

Also I think the lighting on the left of the garden umbrella is quite nice.

[The 'bloom' on the pool lights and shrubbery was added in post.]

Photo by mramshaw

Modern House (Week 2) - 8 bit version, 3.5 MB From the second BlenderGuru...

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:42:50 GMT

Modern House (Week 2) - 8 bit version, 3.5 MB

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

6 hours to render @ 500 samples, CPU

I ran out of texture memory (VRAM) quickly, but Cycles can cleverly still use the
GPU to render smaller portions of the full scene (so GPU rendering can still be very
useful). After switching to CPU rendering things were good for a while, but my CPU
and memory (RAM) were not up to the job of rendering a full-size scene with a full
lawn of grass.

So I became very parsimonious with textures and particles, even so the grass here
really lets the scene down quite a bit. And of course the background is as bare as
it can be, and some more foliage would be pretty nice too.

I'm not really familiar with hard-edge modelling, so this was an excellent exercise.
I also learned a lot about asset and texture management. Much room to improve!

My compositing hides the thin grass a little, but I am not really trying to hide it,
this colour grading was pretty much what I was aiming for all along.

Photo by mramshaw

Reading Room (Week 1) - 16 bit version, 10.7 MB From the second BlenderGuru...

Wed, 28 May 2014 22:45:15 GMT

Reading Room (Week 1) - 16 bit version, 10.7 MB

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

6 hours to render @ 500 samples, CPU

(More options for Post-processing with this but I can't see any difference between this and the 8-bit version!)

Photo by mramshaw

Reading Room (Week 1) - 8 bit version, 3.6 MB From the second BlenderGuru...

Wed, 28 May 2014 22:43:31 GMT

Reading Room (Week 1) - 8 bit version, 3.6 MB

From the second BlenderGuru Architecture Academy, PLEASE VIEW LARGE

[Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Comments and critique are very welcome.

6 hours to render @ 500 samples, CPU

(Less options for Post-processing with this but I can't see any difference between this and the 16-bit version!)

Photo by mramshaw

Simple Lounge Room (freebie) from the first BlenderGuru Architecture Academy...

Wed, 28 May 2014 22:42:55 GMT

Simple Lounge Room (freebie) from the first BlenderGuru Architecture Academy

PLEASE VIEW LARGE [Click on the image to view the full-size version]

Photo by mramshaw

It seems that bump mapping, at least, is in Cycles. It's not as easy to use...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:26:33 GMT

It seems that bump mapping, at least, is in Cycles.

It's not as easy to use as in Blender Internal, so it took me a while to find out how to do this.

It will be nice when Cycles has full normal mapping, also Cycles does not have as much control (yet) either.

It's a subtle difference, compare this render with my previous one to see if you can spot the differences.

[In my opinion, this surface looks more like wood veneer and less like formica, if I've done things right.]

Photo by mramshaw

Some more fun considering Photography from the ground up. Looking at the fine...

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:55:03 GMT

Some more fun considering Photography from the ground up. Looking at the
fine details in a RAW file, noise is always present. The usual process is
to try and reduce any nasty Chroma noise as much as possible, while at the
same time retaining as much 'grain' (i.e. detail) as possible.

Here I am trying the new Cycles renderer in Blender, which is very noisy.
The noise can be reduced at the expense of more render passes, so greater
render times (a brute force approach, really). I started with 50 passes,
then 500, then 1,000 and then I started tweaking things. Finally, I upped
the quality and rendered this image (which took 20 minutes to render, that
being 20 minutes of parallelized CISC computing on my GPU using CUDA and
very fast VRAM memory). I suspect the quality may get acceptable somewhere
at around 10,000 passes. To be fair, this is an indoor scene - which is
where Cycles is supposed to be weak. So, I still don't think CG will be
replacing Photography any time soon.

The older Blender Internal (BI) renderer does a number of things very well,
for instance I think the wood here would look a lot better with some Bump
Mapping - but Cycles does not really support this well yet. On the other
hand, Cycles handles Caustics and GI (Global Illumination) pretty well. BI,
on the either hand, can not really do either of these. But materials/textures
in Cycles involves using Nodes, which work well but require more fundamental
understanding of the issues (basically a chained mathematical approach to
what would be layers in GIMP/PS).

I created everything in this scene from scratch (apart from the fine wood
texture) by following this highly detailed tutorial:

cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/blender/create-and-render-a-still-life-scene-in-blender-using-cycles/

Having some experience with Blender, I did not follow it too exactly, so
I was expecting the poor quality of my modelling to show up in the render.
However, the exercise seems to have been designed very well, as the Cycles
materials and textures have completely rescued what should have been a
pretty poor-quality effort on my part.

Cycles has the promise of being a 'one-click' solution to the general
lighting problems inherent in CG scenes, whereas BI involves lots and lots
of very laborious tweaking to get good results. In the same way as RGB and
CMYK are different viewpoints on the same subject, each valid for slightly
different things, I think Cycles and BI may co-exist for a while yet. It
seems to me that BI is more of a wave-based approach to light, while Cycles
is more of a particle-based approach, but in either case I think a very good
understanding and eye for the qualities of light is still needed (the promise
of a 'one-click' solution still seems far away. In the same way that both GI
as well as Caustics have only come to be understood quite recently, and mainly
show up with man-made materials under controlled lighting conditions, it is
only possible to represent these accurately with a good understanding of how
they are caused and their physics. Of course, neither are particularly necessary,
so BI is still a good solution for almost all lighting conditions.)

Luckily, the Cycles people, after starting with a completely new approach
to lighting (it seems that they decided that everything should be an Area
lamp) realized that there was a baby in the bath-water, and reincorporated
all of the tradititional lamps into Cycles. So a hybrid approach is much
more feasible now. You can use Cycles for what it is really good at (being
real-time lighting, albeit very noisy) and then switch over to BI (once the
lighting is set up). Or even composite both of them (with the expense of
duplicating entire scenes) for a fully-hybrid approach (the upcoming 'Tears
of Steel' open movie does this somewhat, I think). However, all of this means
an increase in complexity, rather than a reduction. Kind of like processing
a RAW file as opposed to a JPEG (and now that Blender can handle HDR files,
I may have to look into processing these at some point, although the last time
I tried processing a file in 32-bit mode I ran out of disk space [paged-out
memory swap files] in about 5 minutes).

As always, comments and critique are very welcome, and I respond in kind.

Photo by mramshaw

Cycles (the new Blender renderer) has an awesome ability to chew through...

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 22:32:44 GMT

Cycles (the new Blender renderer) has an awesome ability to chew through Geometry.
It leverages the power of your video card to perform floating-point operations
(in parallel, no less) and performs really well (but your screen will be locked
up completely, as your GPU is busy with other things).

So it seemed to be time to really get to grips with it. I used this tutorial:

http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/create-realistic-materials-with-cycles

After 50 passes, there was still grain, here after 150 passes some remains.
It might be possible to increase the number of passes to fix these 'fireflies'
but the scene looks okay with a few.

Conclusion: materials with nodes are tricky, also Cycles is still changing.
I think I'll stick with Blender Internal for now, but Cycles is impressive.

[Best viewed at 100%, there are actually some boots back there!]

Photo by mramshaw

Leather Cycling Glove Leather palm, mesh back, fingerless Reinforced palm...

Mon, 18 May 2009 07:52:35 GMT

Leather Cycling Glove
Leather palm, mesh back, fingerless
Reinforced palm stitching for durability
Different colors available
Velcro strap for comfort adjustment.
A modern cycling glove with a vintage retro look
OEM/ODM services are available with desired logos & tags

Photo by fapot001

Leather Cycling Glove Available in cow/sheep and goat leather Rich soft,...

Mon, 18 May 2009 07:52:17 GMT

Leather Cycling Glove
Available in cow/sheep and goat leather
Rich soft, smooth natural leather cycling glove is made from super premium goatskin
Padded palm and reinforcements on wear areas.
leather in the palms for added protection
Velcro wrist closure
Different color possibilities
OEM/ODM services are available with desired logos & tags

Photo by fapot001

cycle

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:43:19 GMT

cycle

Photo by insky