DasFrodo

Good stuff! I can see your progress with every rendering 😉 The aberration, don't forget the aberration!

I disagree. A UI and UX can be judged after a couple of hours already. At least to a certain extent. After a couple of hours I can already tell if an interface is unintuitive as hell or not, if it's ugly or beautiful and if parts of it make sense or don't. I can use zBrush for 10 hours and still tell the UI is an absolute dumpsterfire. People that have used the software for thousands of hours are often blind to problems with the UI, myself included. "It's not that bad" or "If you learn it you'll be okay with it" is stuff I've often heard about Blender or zBrush. Problem is "it's not that bad" is "it's horrible"s little brother.

This is looking better and better 👌

Yeah, that is something that always frustrated me with Blender. You spend tons of time finding out which hotkey does the exact thing you need because there is no visual representation of that hotkey in any menu. You either know it's there or you're screwed. That there are millions of different releases and thus millions of different tutorials on different versions that potentially teach you something that is long, long gone or easier to do doesn't help at all. It's just a frustrating experience overall compared to more "traditional" softwares where you have access to EVERYTHING via the menus.

Very talented people due to the increadibly positive atmosphere that Blender and its community oozes. Everything is open source so outside people can help squash bugs and issues. Probably a ton of bug reports from outside unlike many other softwares where it's sometimes even hard to find where to report a bug. etc.

Welcome! Enjoy your stay 😃

Just playing around a little... it's not perfect but whatever, don't feel like rerendering this at all 😛 Hint: It loops! Mindfuckery_FINAL.mp4

Another one! Trying out the Quixel Scans and some more lighting stuff...

Hm fair enough. Although I did write it's not "traditional raytracing", not that there is no rays involved. You can control the "noise" up to a certain point with a final gather value for both the GI and the Reflections; for the shadows there is no such setting. Maybe it's just not exposed in the interface yet. I can imagine this being the case. Anyways, I did some more testing yesterday and I just imported my Space Marine model with one material and some lighting. I still think it looks remarkably close to a real pathtracer. Really, really hyped what people come up with in the next months with this new technology.

I think you have a fundamental misconception on how this works; this is not traditional raytracing. As far I can tell at this point it's doing its lighting calculations in a different form of geometry, called Signed Distance Field. Each mesh is represented in the rendering engine as a Signed Distance Field, GI and other calculations are made on this, and this is then applied to the classec rasterized geometry. Kind of like a hybrid, just like realtime raytracing works for now. Some parts are rasterized, some parts are raytraced. There is nothing like the classic noise you know from engines like Octane since there is no "samples per pixel" or anything like this. It's all an approximation with all the limitations that come with all approximations. In Lumen there is nothing like "amount of bounces" or anything since it works completely different. What you rather get (especially with very clean surfaces and small light sources) is the classic "light blotches" you get from Irradiance Cache in C4D. Just look at the video I posted above with the many small glowing spheres and you'll see what I mean. If you want to know more about this I recommend you look into the documentation (there is already a lot to read there) or just download it and try for yourself. If you can work with C4D and Blender you will have no issues doing basic stuff in Unreal Engine.

Hell, even C4D and every other DCC converts to triangles. You just don't get to see it as user.

Well there's still a lot of stuff you simply can't do with realtime engines. Transparencies or translucent materials is one of these things. Subsurface Scattering is still "eh". All the GI and stuff that I showed up there are just approximations. If you made that scene with the small glowing spheres in Octane or Redshift or something similiar you would get "perfect" lighting and shadows. In Unreal it's a blotchy mess. Even with all the modern techniques realtime is still a lot more finicky than just simply chucking a shitty model in a DCC app. You get issues way more quickly. You are not as flexible. Etc. If you haven't, just go ahead and try porting one of your projects. UE supports alembic. Depending on what you were doing in that scene you're going to run into limitations very quickly. It's really cool tech and it has its place but it's simply not a replacement for classic render engines. It's just another tool.

Alright I've played around with the new lighting and rendering engine "Lumen" for a bit now. It's... really freaking impressive stuff. Here's some examples. Mind you, NOTHING in this is hardware raytraced. All software. Theoretically runs on anything, even if it doesn't support RTX. It seems like they're using Signed Distance Field for pretty much everything. So what you get is basically: Real area shadows (depending on your light source shape), realtimge GI, realtime reflections and one of the most impressive things: realtime emissive meshlighting! Depending on the mesh size it's very noisy but again, this is realtime and it's early access. Let's see what comes in the future. One warning though if you want to try it out: it is VERY VERY crash happy, at least on my machine. I've played with it for about 2h now and I had at least one crash every 10-15minutes, oftentimes, depending on what I was doing, much more frequent. Still, very cool tech! Realtime Area Shadows SVyuV9UQJd.mp4 Realtime... Lighting? 8Clw4IW0Y0.mp4 More Realtime Lighting! No traditional lighs in the scene! 92btR6k4z9.mp4 Realtime Emissive Materials / Meshlights. No traditional lighs in the scene! IRBYvQwKDp.mp4

So yeah, they just dropped that. Without announcements. For everyone to try. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-is-now-available-in-early-access

Yeah I gotta say as cool as X-Particles is, as long as you're not trying to stay inside C4D for all your work it's just no Match for Houdini. It's generally easier to quickly setup particle systems, but the power is not even close. And especially fluid simulations are just SO MUCH faster in Houdini... That said, your plugin looks really cool and I'm sure there's going to be many users that want exactly something like this for an affordable price inside C4D. I heard this as a feature request many, many times over the years. Any chance there's going to be some kind of speed comparison with X-Particles in the future?

Good stuff! Where were you when I didn't have X-Particles and Houdini 😪 ?

That was a seriously impressive video. And seriously impressive work from the people making these movies. I still can't believe how crafty these people had to be to make these effects happen... especially since a lot of this stuff can be done by someone nowadays after 15mins of After Effects beginner tutorials.

That has some weird zombie apocalypse vibes to it.

You can help banding a bit if you add some noise in post. You just have to find the right values since too much wrecks the encoder on youtube and makes quality even worse and too little doesn't have any effect. But overall theres just some banding you can't really fix. YouTube bitrate is just too low. If you want your work to look as good as it get's you either have to host it yourself or you can use Vimeo. Vimeo has really, really high bitrates. As for your work, I think it looks mostly great, especially the lights in the beginning but I do think the quality of the animation degrades a bit as soon as "the action" starts. I can't really explain it, but it feels like tons of work went into the falling net, the lights turning on and the middle part just looks a bit... Vanilla? Both in terms of animation as well as the grading. I think you can get A LOT out of this animation if you do some more color work on the middle part.

I think you should invest in a new lens... that abberation is rough 🥴

NVidia already (kind of) does this with DLSS. I was sceptical when it first came out but it's such an amazing tech.

Got something done, wohoo! 100% Houdini + Redshift

This is getting out of hand! Now there's three of them! JellyBowlFixed.mp4 EDIT: Network and *.hip for anybody curious 🙂 Jelly.hiplc