This my be a little premature but, I started this thread as a catch all for discussing the latest developments in the GSOC 2013 Cycles mblur branch. This is specifically dedicated to motion blur of deformable meshes in Blender. I’d also love to open the discussion of this same feature in other third party renderers as well. Hopefully we can create a resource for those wanting to help with development and testing.
Please note that I was only able to build it with Scons and not my normal build system of CMake and XCode so there may be unforeseen issues. So, use at your own risk.
Right now, as noted in the latest SVN notes, it’s totally unoptimized so that means it’s about 10 times slower than scenes that don’t use motion blur. Don’t expect to use it for anything serious. The main reason I posted it is just so we can get a preview of what’s in store.
To use:
1.) Enable “Motion Blur” in the render panel.
2.) select your animated deforming mesh and in the object data panel, turn on “Motion Blur” there as well and check “Deformation Motion Blur”. This needs to be done for all objects that you want to exhibit motion blur.
3.) render. Expect it to take extra time to update objects and build the BVH.
A good tip is to start out with very low samples. Render and entire frame and raise the samples to see how much longer it will make it take.
Not an opinion, that’s a cold hard fact! Glad we’re finally getting it, I had my doubts about it watching the weekly GSoC updates but it looks like Gavin and Brecht managed to pull through. Now, the arduous process of optimizing BVH builds for moving triangles!
According to Ton, he stated that the GSOC student will not be able to finish this in time for pencils down, but Brecht will take it on afterwards and it will be a priority for him in the fall.
So there you have it! One the most important missing features in cycles IS FINALLY HAPPENING!
I know you mentioned how inefficient rendering hair is with deformation blur at the moment, but how did you accomplish this? What were your particle settings? Did you have to set the hair to triangle primitives?
Yep, you have to set them to triangle. Setting them to line segments or curve simply renders them without blur. I’ve been trying all day to get a render to show but I keep running into issues. I can render about 2 or 3 frames and then it just starts going crazy.
This somewhat humorous set of images was the result of many hours of struggling. But, it’s to be expected at this early stage. You may have noticed that the hair on the ball is quite sparse. I had expected to render with children turned on but when I finally got to rendering it, it was just way yo time consuming.
I’ve also found that if you escape out of a render, it seems to corrupt the scene in the renderer. Sometimes you can get it back by moving to a new frame and rendering again. But most of the time if this happens you can just save the scene and reopen it again and it’s back to normal.
Hmmm… I might wait until there is more work done to it, but I couldn’t get the same results. Unless I am talking about something different, and maybe I am.
I had a default cube and had the hair just simply fall down with gravity, I wanted to try to render that with motion blur and it seem to give extremely odd results. My cube, even though it was stagnant and did not move, was completely blurry in an add “depth of field” kind of way (just to be clear, that is how I am describing it, there was no DOF on the camera).
Yeah I agree, I think we should stay away from hair and mblur for the moment. As you can see from the series of images I posted earlier, it’s not working at all just yet.
@Qha, post your spider here. Do you have an animation yet? I’d love to see it moving.
I have no report this week. After my failings to get enough done, Ton,Brecht, and I had a conversation by email. We all agreed that I do not have
the skills to carry this project to completion. I decided to voluntarily
withdraw from GSoC to let the developers spend their time on more valuable
pursuits.
I apologize to the community for my failure. I just don’t have the capacity
to write code for a renderer yet. However, I will continue to maintain the
branch (handling merges and so forth), and perhaps commit things when I can
find time (school has just started for me). I do that in the hope that
Brecht will be able to use the branch to complete deformation motion blur
with little work in the future.
Once again, I am sorry for my failure. Thank you all for the great summer.
I was reading every week the reports from Gavin and I kinda feel it was going to end this way. I really appreciate the effort (if you ever read this Gavin) and don’t get discouraged, you might have failed GSOC but from failures you learn the most.
On the other hand while reading the struggles in the reports or weeks without almost no progress I honestly felt that maybe the election of the student wasn’t correct. Maybe there were no other talents out there, but with only 2 small commits and just 20 years with little experience, 3 months don’t seem enough to get a project finished.
Anyway, I’m very excited that Brecht is taking over the project
Lukas has already been working as a paid developer for a week now (with his area right now being in the vein of fixing some tricky issues with the node system)
And Thomas has already started working on the volume code, so I guess for Cycles it just leaves deformation blur, rendertime displacement, and baking as far as major features go (then we get to the fun stuff of smaller todos and optimization work).
Awesome! Great job. Did you render the DOF in camera? If so, you should try rendering without it. DOF and Motion blur are both camera effect and it’s going to slow each other down.
You may have noticed that the hair on the ball is quite sparse. I had expected to render with children turned on but when I finally got to rendering it, it was just way yo time consuming.
