Gravity the movie was truly “kick .ass” in every possible way including graphics.
Looks like a very interesting engine for its money. But I suspect you need a serious render farm to really take advantage of this render engine’s true potential. Definitely way out of my league but none the less a very welcomed addition to Blender.
Isn’t that true of all non-raster engines though? Regardless, Arnold flies even on a single CPU. Especially in scenes with hair, SSS, or lots of displacement/objects, or motion blur/DoF blur, it’s not uncommon for me to see 10x speed increases over Cycles.
Probably dumb question but how come it is that much faster on CPU ?
Speaking of Gravity, I honestly dont know why so many people liked it. Aside from the great visuals, it was just a movie about Sandra Bullock screaming her head off non stop until shes back on earth. No major story arch’s, nothing solid narrative wise…some forced hallucination and thats it.
That said, Pacific Rim on the other hand really showed up some impressive shots along with an equally impressive narrative in my opinion. Arnold is in quite a bit these days.
It’s a shame that otherwise good software is let down by its creators’ poor appreciation of language. Modo is a perfect example. So badly named I can’t sit through a whole tutorial before the sound “modo” puts me off. It sounds moronic, a dead dodo.
Now we have Arnold settling on kick and ass. It works as a joke, and it might last a couple of minutes around the whiteboard as you’re brainstorming naming ideas, but that they actually decided to use it is just pathetic. I don’t share any kind of “moral” concern about it. But it could have been named more neutrally. The joke, like all jokes, will get old soon enough. The people who decided this need to get a life.
Years and years of optimization by a team of top-of-their-field experts in every area of ray tracing. In particular, they have a BVH guru named Thiago Ize who has done some crazy optimizations for their traversal code, which is the largest chunk of time in any ray tracer. They also have some math wiz PhD types who have come up with some very nice ways of solving shader speed issues. And of course an entire team of expert coders.
Gravity was a small story (lost hope & redemption) and Pacific Rim had an indifferent story (generic action), but both these movies were the best movie experiences I had last year, and both of them are on my personal “Best VFX to date” list. Love them both, even if I like Gravity a bit more as a whole.
On-topic:
Does Arnold use OSL or is that only in SPI’s inhouse version? Blender/Cycles will be a great steppingstone for people wanting a job writing shaders for big productions.
true they must pull off a trick similar to Zbrush with heavy memory optimisation.
Well I can tell you my opinion as a guy that was blown away by Gravity , put it a 10/10 and I consider one of the top 10 sci fi films of all time.
I am also a big fan or Pacific Rim that I am rating at 9/10 and I cant wait for a sequel. However to get from my 9 to my 10 will be 10 times more hard than getting from my 8 to 9.
Now let me explain why
a) GRAPHICS
I start from this because it is what interests us as artists the most and is relevant to the thread as Arnold was used as the render engine. There is no comparison between Rim and Gravity graphics wise. Rim was awesome concept art, beautiful colors, captivating action but simple Gravity is another league on its own. Just compare the huge robots against the space station rendering wise. Robot looks impressive but the rendering inside Gravity is just phenomenal. And to top even that they have recreated ISS to the last bolt and that is a statement coming from Astronauts that have been on the ISS. Destruction wise, yes giant monster via giant robots is alot more fun but again art wise and technical wise again the destruction of ISS is just in a league of its own when compare to the RIM. RIM is very good, its just the Gravity is awesome in this field.
b) ACTING
I don’t think there is much debate, easily one of Sandra Bullocks best films. Kinda disappointed that Clooney did not have a more lengthy role but both actors are performing on full throttle. RIM is simply not about acting.
c) PLOT
Now this is the are that is the most debatable. RIM and Gravity are simple minded movies, there is no much development in them either than RIM is Robots punching Monsters , Gravity is just a survival movie. But I agree Gravity simply has close to no plot at all while Rim has a lot more going on into it.
d) Directing
Now this is also not much debatable, RIM is very well directed, it delivers the goods to what it promised. Gravity on the other hand not only delivers but it gives you something that other sci fis dont, a movie that is more gravitated (pun intended) towards science than it is towards fiction. The movie simply is accurate in many things, but is the first to show accurate space walk, accurate human interaction with space, accurate replica of ISS and accurate many thing apart from two. The death of Clooney and the fact that the two Space Station are on the same plane.
e) Music
No comparison here, Gravity wins hands down the last soundtrack I listened to that was so good was Inception.
Gravity wins it because even though it does not have the fun factor of Pacific Rim, its a very serious accurate look of humans enduring space and the challenges of space travel. I have to say me being a big fan of space travel and astronomy it was just much easier to be very much impressed by Gravity. I am not saying you dont have every right not to like Gravity but since you wondered why people like Gravity I wanted to give you my look on this.
I was always curious what the implementation was, and seeing that it’s only a plugin or command line renderer is kind of a surprise. I had always assumed there was a standalone GUI of some kind, with the option of using plugins instead for Softimage or Maya.
Anybody doing anything with the demo yet?
Solid Angle’s version of Arnold does not use OSL for shaders, however the shader system they do use can be entirely customized using a C/C++ like system. Companies like Oblique and Kettle have released free custom shader packs already.
I’ve been told, though, that they would like to switch to OSL at some point in the future, it’s just a matter of planning, breaking compatibility, and available man hours at this point.
Seriously? Thats your complaints? That you get annoyed by the sound of a software’s naming choice and choose to pick on a file name? Sorry but thats just kindergarden logic right there. If you want to find fault with something, you can do better, perhaps with something more concrete. By the way, did you know Blender was named after this song by the band known as Yellow?
Here’s a line from the song that inspired the name Blender:
“Blenders for sale, and im selling to girls, they always know who i am, what I do, she gave me no wink, just a smile on her hips and a sip of my glass and lets go”
I personally think this all good natured fun, and many of the people who make such software are normal geeky people who are not going to be “super serious” and boring in the process. They shouldnt have to be.
Their memory system is very efficient, but it’s more to do with the fact that nearly EVERYTHING in their engine is optimized to take full advantage of up to 64 processing threads. This includes things that are single-threaded almost everywhere else like displacement calculations. And really, their BVH system is top notch. Since subdivisions and displacements are done after export to Arnold, export times are kept low. And even then, the system doesn’t even bother to subdivide an object until it’s been hit by a ray. This saves a lot of time in certain cases. I’m not sure what kind of Voodoo they do with hair and SSS though. Tens of millions of hairs start rendering almost instantly on my PC, and with SSS it doesn’t seem to matter how many layers I use, times stay relatively close to the time needed for a single layer, and that in itself if crazy fast.
As a coder myself I can appreciate how heavily code can be optimised. Even when you work in python if you know what you doing you can get insane speed ups. Does Arnold use GPUs in any way ?
I guess you get what you paying for 
No GPU support, and no plans for it any time soon. Their BVH system wouldn’t work at all on the GPU, memory issues, etc. Not much room for GPU rendering in the production field at the moment.
ok fair enough, they know better. I can certainly see myself forking out 1000 euros for this render engine if it comes to blender and I work professionally with 3d graphics. Hopefully in 3 years or so.
Does it need a specific kind of CPU ? or it works fine on all CPUs ? Does it take advantage of any specific technology ? Curently I have a 6 day old iMac 27’’ i5 3.2Ghz quad core and 8 GB memory (will upgrade to 32 gbs in a year or less).
They compile with ICC, which is the intel compiler, and I suspect they are using some Intel-specific optimizations in the code itself. I know that their internal “test case” is a custom 32-core/64-thread beast provided by Intel, so I’d assume that you’d get the best performance out of their hardware.
To all: I would appreciate it, if this naming discussion could be discussed elsewhere, maybe start a poll on Facebook… That’s just ridiculous.
Do everyone a favour and stick to reporting the news, because every time you get on that prissy high horse of yours, flame wars ensue, usually ending in you getting a warning or being banned from the forums for a short time.
Incidentally, another morally indignant “crusader” could look at that signature of yours and assume you are sexually attracted to dragons, then complain about the promotion of bestiality in the forums.
ON TOPIC:
So without an exporter, what would be the best method of actually getting your scenes into Arnold? Any advice would be appreciated.
If you don’t like the naming convention don’t use the software, simple as that. No-one is going to rename their software because some immature people can’t stand certain words (which they are not even going to see if they are using a proper exporter). It is your own loss if you don’t want to use the software, really.
It’s also pretty funny considering that you are all using a software called “Blender”.
EDIT: Sorry Dingto, didn’t see your post there.