Brecht left to Solid Angle - Arnold plugin for Blender please...

We as blender users had a huge hit to us with the loss of Brecht to Solid Angle, one we are happy for him about.

My thought is, we now have a guy with the skill base and the contacts to make an Arnold plugin for Blender. Currently their license for educational purposes is only available to educational institutes… but if they modified that… I would drop a couple hundred bucks to use the Arnold renderer in a heart beat.

Just wondering if their would be others wanting this, enough of a demand for it to make it financial viable for Solid Angle. Not to mention that they could potentially get younger users accustomed to their renderer before they go to school, etc…

Educational license is $200 a year. Their full version though is $1200 with a $300 maintenance fee… and you have to buy at least 5 of them. Ya, they are aiming at studios only. But maybe with Brecht they will understand the benefit that can come with catering to the more casual user, freelance artist and smaller studios.

Maybe wishful thinking but…

Just a thought here, but isn’t the aim of the Cycles project to reach the render quality of Arnold?

If so, maybe the best route would be to support the development of Cycles instead, no?

I hope not, Arnold is a professional grade renderer that, while it needs to be optimized, can afford to have longer render times for the Hollywood market. I think cycles (and blender internal) can make professional results, in the right hands, but they need to be optimized completely for the smaller budgets of independents and small studios.

Doing a still in Arnold, or learning the tools of the trade, is something that appeals to me personally. But I hope that cycles and Arnold does not evolve in the same way

Isn’t Arnold already highly optimised to have shorter render times for the Hollywood market? Wasn’t it in development for nearly 20 years for just this purpose?

I guess people who use Arnold don’t use Blender. It’s also much better to have internal renderer that works 100% with the software. Developers should concentrate on Cycles, I think even drop BI which already has become quite obsolete, because I’m sure it just makes things more complicated for no reason.

Regarding BI, what BI needs to become is an engine that doesn’t try so hard to become a raytracer and instead focuses development energy on a comprehensive legacy/NPR solution akin to how Renderman used to be (which is the type of thing it is good at).

This would naturally come with more GLSL code for the viewport which in turn will benefit BGE users as well, so you would have two rendering systems geared towards different techniques and different styles.

Let’s not make this an “Arnold vs. Cycles” thread. Arnold integration in Blender would be great to have, no one thinking straight can deny that. But it’s not an either-or situation. We can have both.

Not gonna happen. Freestyle depends on BI.

I think even drop BI which already has become quite obsolete, because I’m sure it just makes things more complicated for no reason.

Yes, when a new rewritten from scratch BI can replace it. A pathtracer is not for the task. Cycles simply fails as expected.
A modern GLSL render engine… maybe.
BTW, things are complicated for many and very good reasons. We don’t have the same needs. Art loves individuality.

In the Blender world Brecht is a big cog in a small machine, at Solid Angle he is going to be a small cog in a big machine. I think its really really unlikely that he will have the influence to change something as fundamental as there marketing strategy.

Arnold is a production renderer its not designed to cater for needs of the average Blender user. Thous who are able to leverage the power of Arnold and have a project that needs it are likely able to write there own exporter.

I think it is counter productive to request features that only a large studio can really leverage unless you actually need it. I’m not apposed to an Arnold exporter, I just think that the effort that’s been put into the discussions about different renderer exporters is misplaced. I think we would be better talking about Alembic and Cortex interchange format support.

Not only will they allow for more streamlined exporters to ALL external renders to be made, they will also allow use to create pipelines that use standalone renderers like Gorilla, Appleseed, ect or 3rd party scene management tools like Katana or Gaffer.

even if some blender user have arnold schwarzenegger they would produce crap. cycles is killa

i dont think that any good looking cg image dont mattter which render engine is rendered in 1 min.

“Isn’t Arnold already highly optimised to have shorter render times for the Hollywood market? Wasn’t it in development for nearly 20 years for just this purpose?”

I really can’t speak to that, it is an assumption on my part that I may have made to quickly.

"In the Blender world Brecht is a big cog in a small machine, at Solid Angle he is going to be a small cog in a big machine. I think its really really unlikely that he will have the influence to change something as fundamental as there marketing strategy. "

I agree and disagree. People that can work on render engines are few and far between from what I hear. He definitely is a smaller cog now, but I don’t think anyone with his skill set is completely under the radar. With his current knowledge the investment for them is as small as it could ever be. And no, he probably won’t influence the marketing, but other big names in the field are catering more and more to students by providing free licenses now for educational purposes. Solid Angle may be thinking of something like this for universities, etc… already.

And no, in no way is this a cycles vs Arnold thread. You can do some amazing things in cycles and you can produce junk in Arnold, of that I’m sure. Just more options is all I was looking for. I’ve tried some other software for modelling and texture painting as well. Just fun to play around with stuff

In an interview a developers of Arnold mentioned that Arnold excels at crunching really large amounts of data.

It is, here is a commercial made here in Montreal, all Arnold and Softimage, huge amount of polygons and hair.

Arnold excels at handling absolutely enormous data sets. Think a trillion polys after instancing (look up the ring flyover shot from Elysium). It has some neat ways of handling this in the BVH build which I’m probably not supposed to talk about here, but without spoiling anything here I can say that it wouldn’t work on the GPU. Memory is kept to an absolute minimum, and it works really well.

Some of the scenes of the Elysium flyby had as many as 3 trillion polygons, all of which was dealt with Softimage and a specially modified version of Arnold.

I doubt that Maya could have handled such a scene, but Softimage could, thanks to its Gigacore technology.

But now that AD pulled the plug on SI development, We foresee cannibalization of many of softimage technologies to be incorporated in upcoming releases of Maya, so sad really!

As for the rest, since you can implement very efficient BVH building and instancing in GPU, and with memory paging for maps, and GPUs with more ram on the way, I see no reason that such a scene could not be rendered in GPU in the near future!

At least in Cycles’ case, we could always borrow the BVH code being developed by Intel for their Embree engine (which actually looks as if it’s slowly becoming standard across many rendering solutions).

It won’t be Arnold’s BVH, but for the CPU it will be better and more memory efficient than what Cycles has now. I believe DingTo had plans to see about bringing more of that code in last I heard.

If anything I think Brecht will most likely work on OSL integration for Arnold’s public releases. Right now it doesn’t have OSL support.

regarding something like a ‘BtoA’: has anyone tried Jan Walters exporter (io_scene_ass)?

please post results/findings regarding that exporter here (as I dont have time to test myself atm…)

It fails to export in 2.71. Both Blender’s and Arnold’s APIs have changed quite a bit since that addon was created.