Hello everyone, I wanted to share with you some of the renderings recently created for one of my clients. It’s the scandinavian style interior in Tolouse, France.
The scene was fully renderd in Cycles on GTX 970 including the vegetation in the background. I’ve also created some closeups for being used as a mood pictures. All the interior elements were pre-made Blender assets available at chocofur store. You can drag pictures to a new browser window for full resolution.
Really superb work. I would love to see the lighting setup. You have a high end graphics card but the image looks little noisy. I guess you have lots of vertices here. Once again, great work.
These look really nice, the lighting and mood is particularly well done.
Can you give some information about the number of samples and how long the renders took and what resolution the final images were?
Did you use the Path Tracer or the Branched Path Tracer?
I have an older GTX670 which I was thinking of updating, I’m curious to know what kind of performance you’re getting with your 970.
Thanks.
Hey, thanks everyone for your positive feedback, I really didn’t expect that!
@cgstrive and @ctdabomb: I know the pictures are a bit grainy but since they were supposed to be printed out that wasn’t a real issue. However I could have set up the illumination a bit differently for more optimized results.
@peter18 and @Mmoney: there were two area lights in the windows and garden entrance, a sun lamp and environment sky texture. For better sampling and less noise I could have removed some of the walls behind the camera but well… next time I’ve also set diffuse GI bounces to 8 for more precise and realistic looking illumination.
Hi lechu, very inspiring works, as usual.
one question: did you quit using Corona? If I remember correctly in a tutorial you told it would became your engine of choice, would’n it?
another question: in the first picture you made a wonderful job managing tonemapping, especially in the higlights from the exterior. did you use some particular technique? tonemapping in compositing? tonemapping patch from stockner?
thank you in advance
@lsscpp: I didn’t quit using Corona. To be honest with this project I wanted to test my new GTX970 and see how some of the models would work in this king of Cycles lighting environment. Corona is great solution but the Blender addon is still under development and not all features are currently supported.
As for tonemapping, I was trying to balance the highlight areas by tweaking the shaders, later saving the output to 16bit PNG to make sure these areas still have some depth. I also used Canon Optura 981111 look from Color Management settings and set the gamma to 2.0 (instead of “classic” 2.2 for keeping a bit more contrast). I don’t think these are any special techniques, sometimes to really keep some tones in highlights I just save the rendering in 32 bits and work my way in Photoshop. What also might have improved the general “look” could be the diffuse bounces set to 8 which I think create more realistic and natural look.
@John Geoghegan: the final resolutions were 2400 x 1800 and took 4000 samples with standard Path Tracer. I know it’s much and normally there should be a bit less noise visible but… Didn’t have too much time to setup the illumination perfectly.
Below is another color/furniture setup I did and this time I’ve optimized the GI a bit by adding area lights in the windows and decreasing diffuse bounces to 4. Scene used only 2000 samples and I think looks much cleaner than the previous example. In 3200 x 2200 resolution it took around 5 hours for two GTX 970 to render it and I think that’s pretty neat result.
5 hours on two GPUS!!!and the noise is still more than visible.?!
In my i7 CPU I’ll probably need five days.
I won’t stop repeating this:
At least in my eyes Cycles is not the tool for Arch-interiors. It’s like trying to put a nail in the wall using a driller…Of course at the and you can manage to put it but you should better use a hammer and keep your driller for other tasks…
IMHO opinion Blender lacks a capable render engine for this type of render and is more than obvious that there’s no interest in developing one. ArchViz is not in the target audience of Blender… or Cycles.
If we don’t have photon mapping, irradiance cahcing or at least bi-directional path-tracing then there’s no option for Archviz in Blender.
And since all the external renderers seem dead or almost dead the only solution is go with a commercial solution. And even there there aren’t many choices…
2X970 GPUS = 350~400$=700-800$.
If you’re not an American or Australian and get paid thousands for a job… you can dedicate this kind of money for specialized hardware just for Cycles…
This is what I call economic discrimination my fiends…even in the open, free or whatever we like to call it software world…
While I agree that 5 hours per render is quite a lot, you must take into account that the original resolution was quite huge (around 7MPix). I am sure that with some optimization the rendertime would be slightly smaller.
I also agree that the cycles is not the optimal render engine for archiviz, but it is definitely the best integrated one (!) and extremely versatile.
As for the alternative computation methods: Photons are old and problematic (I definitely don’t want to see them in Blender), irradiance could be nice for previews, bi-directional could be also nice (but I wonder how fast would it render on GPU).
The main problem with doing archiviz with blender is definitely not the slow speed of cycles. It is mainly a lack of specialized modelling tools (I miss parametric modeling) and the very complicated and not very flexible scene management.
Prices: In my country the avarage salary is probably even lower than in Greece. The Poland is also not exactly “wealthy” country (no offense). But I still earn enough to buy a gtx970. For your info - if I would go the “commercial software” route, I would pay around 6000$ only for the software. I could buy 15 of those cards for the same price (!).
@maraCZ: Sorry man I don’t think that’s a lot of moaning (though its some) and you must admit that is also some truth involved.
I almost agree with you.
OK every rendering method has its problems and yes photon map has its own but I would like to have a Yafaray like rendering engine around.
I’m glad that you are lucky enough to be able to buy yourself 970’s but where I live things are not like that. Rarely a client is willing to pay something that goes beyond 1000 euros. They prefer not to do the job than pay you this kind of money. So the only solution is to lower the price and do more jobs. To do more jobs you need faster previews, faster renderings and faster post production. So as you can understand it’s a catch 22. You need money before you make money?!
On the other hand why we should spend all this money on hardware rather than donating even half of them to BF for example?
And of course I’m sick to hear all that bull about commercial software cost $$$$. Yes it costs but the Internet is full of goodies and you know what i mean. Why everybody on the forums pretend that they don’t use any pirated software…come on man I guess that you all out there have at least 2-3 of them.
My choice not to use pirated material, use Linux as an OS and Blender as my every day tool is a matter of personal choice,not matter of ethics.
It’s more than easy to find anything these days and i don’t believe that the cops will bust in my house seeking my machine for criminal evidence.
Not to mention that the big companies like Autobesk have a loose anti-cracking protection. It’s their way of making their software popular and produce cheap labor for the big production companies. If you have to pay 3000 to learn a software then you probably charge multiple times this amount.
Anyway it was more of a philosophical question and less of a question that needed an answer.
Blender is was it is, Cycles is also, I’m just stating how i feel cause i got a problem and no solution.
(If in your country a GTX 970 costs 200euros buy me two of them and i’ll come pick’em cause in my country the cheapest on-line cost 395)
Very nice job! The render looks really photorealistic.