testing new Nested Dielectrics inside Anrold renderer
Tag: arnold
Arnold toon shader test
I am starting to test Arnold Renderer in Houdini Solaris. it took me a while to figure how to makes it work in Solaris context. I’ve need to create beauty render pass and render product with contour sampling.
its work pretty good, there some crashes from Solaria. the live render navigation is difficult to navigate, because it take 2nd sample round to generate hatches.
the shading is yet quite simple, but i will start to generate more complex toon shadings.
Arnold 6 in Solaris Houdini
testing Arnold 6 in Solaris for loodev in Houdini from, Sidefx. its has really potential and its fun to work with, only a Arnold render HDA is missing.
the scene was running on my Thinkpad
marble rendertest
Inspired by great Marble renders and Shader hack by Lee Griggs. I’ve decided to recreate some tricks with different render engines, a little render Comparison.
The basic idea, using a glass shader for outter shell and an inner sphere with textured volume to fake depth. this way, you will save a lots of work with actually modeling the inner part of a marble. Spectral renderer don’t use this kind of trickery they can actully the inner part as real glass medium (using textures).
I’ve use Cycles (Blender), Renderman, Arnold, Octane and Indigo Renderer. I’ve tried to create a Marvel in Redshift, but i could make it work with single texture and 2 spheres. For Redshift you need actually model a marvel to get realistic rendering.
the spectral rendere engines was the fastest by far. that’s because with spectral render I used a medium instead of volume for interia, that’s saves a lot of render time.
here is quick test with single glass object with Indigo and Cycles :
this here are glass spheres with regular solid texture spheres inside:
arnold6 USD tests
I am testing new Arnold6 native USD support. Fist time to pixel is super fast, 2-3 seconds on arnold6 CPU with 1 million splines USD asset 8 sec. on Arnold6 GPU in Houdini and Gaffer.
Its a shame, that’s Autodesk HtoA plugin is is unusable. interactive rendering does not takes any updates, except shader values changes and light exposure changes. Also, Arnold6 GPU have big render artifacts with spline render mode set to “Thick”. what it look likes a cool shader, are actually render artefacts.
also arnold6 GPU renders 5 times slower then CPU version as soon i turn on SSS or transmission. ( quadro RTX5000 vs Xeon 6 core at 2.4 GHz )
testing new Arnold 6.0.3 GPU renderer update on particles
Recent HtoA 5.2.1 made it possible to actually use Arnold6 GPU in Houdini, i tool it on a test ride with particles. (5 million particles).
the setup is quite simple, pure diffuse shading only AA samples. I’ve chosen a darker frame to test the sample quality.
CPU 2 minutes on 6 core Xeon
GPU 1 minute (Nvidia Quadro RTX5000), same sample count the CPU render above but more little more noise.
GPU 1:30 minute, increased the sample to get a noise free render.
the Arnold GPU render it getting slowly faster the Arnold CPU in some cases, there is still long road ahead to for the GPU renderer speed to catch up with competition.
star simulation with OpenCL
birth of a massive star. for my little #astrophysics exploration, i’ve created a star simulation using openCL in houdini. its based on nbody #physics model, only driven by #gravity. using #nvidia #quadro rtx 5000 #NVIDIAStudio. #arnoldrender
the colours are not quite right, I am trying to integrate kelvin colour temperature. the current colour is based on density and speed.
In this simulation, I assumed 48% amount of negative gravity to fill the mystery of dark matter. I used 1 million nbodies for the simulation. for the steps, I am planning to add finer particle streams to get more details.
atmossphere volume in arnold
rendered with Arnold in Houdini. I’ve tried the atmosphere volumes the first time. easy to setup. The render time was quite slow on the volumes, typically for volumes, but much faster then render the screen envr with VDB cloud. I’ve used a mesh light for inner character illumination.
it’s a shame I could not use Arnold 6 GPU, because its missing features. Volumes would boost get huge speed boost with volume raymarching on a GPU. I had to use a denoiser from Affinity Photo in dark areas.
with Arnold 6 GPU it does not drop any errors, you have to wait 1-2 minutes if data is loaded to GPU and starts the rendering or not. even a wrong file pass to an Hdri image makes Arnold GPU drop out, you sitting and wait in front of a black screen and don’t know if it will render or not.
off the grid
Arnold vs renderman
