This is incorrect

goat

Daryl Dunlap
GPU is the future for Production render engines

I don't know of any production using non-biased rendering that finishes on the GPU. Everyone uses CPU to render final quality, as it scales and the renderer is fully featured. Please let us know if this is incorrect.

In the advertisment market yes in the movie industry no but coming. That is what i have heard…

druitre
This is incorrect

Thanks. Do have an example?

Everything we do. www.planetx.nl

Ok, you have some nice work there, but I guess I'm looking for the very best GPU rendered work around. Does it compare to any Hollywood movie? If it's the future, it sure must be better than CPU rendering.

I must be the only person earth that do not like Redshift. The speed is great, but I am not sold on the quality.
This is NOT to say there is no top quality work done in Redshift out there, but my personal experience was really bad.

Arnold on the other hand…

Who could have forseen that a forum post along the lines of ‘should I use product X or product Y’ could have gone badly? Those usually go so well…

Reminder: Please keep it civil if you don't want your lively debate to get locked down. Lookin' at you, Daryl.

Just to clarify: SideFX and Redshift (and other renderers as well) have a friendly partnership. We work well together and support each others efforts. Juanjo and I aren't meeting up for tea and crumpets on the daily and we don't share code but I do e-mail him once a month when we update our production build and they try to sync up on that when they do their next release. Syncing up on production builds is as good as we've got right now.

Werner Ziemerink
I must be the only person earth that do not like Redshift. The speed is great, but I am not sold on the quality.

There is definitely a “look” issue that I believe the RS team is aware of themselves (and have publicly acknowledged to some degree).

At the moment, the closest equivalent to CPU images that GPU renderers seem to be able to achieve is probably Octane who for some reason has gotten really maligned, perhaps unfairly so.

Is this all because of the biased vs. unbiased? I don't think so, although that's probably part of it. I feel the big elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is that GPU rendering requires workarounds and cheats that are inherent with the technology and which, at least for the time being, are simply not on par with the CPU equivalents. A good case-in-point is the overly-hyped RT ray-tracing that Nvidia RTX GPU's promise. Many people bought into it as providing the equivalent of CPU renders, except in real-time. The truth is that it doesn't, it relies on an extremely low sample count to extrapolate visual information that normally requires a lot more rays being cast. GPU rendering of course is different than RT, and considerably more refined, but still heavily reliant on workarounds in order to achieve what it does.

Ultimately what is production-acceptable or isn't depends on the needs of the production. I have seen extremely believable work done in RT engines, and I have seen extremely crappy and unrealistic renders done with Arnold. I think a lot depends on who is driving!

Here's one of the most impressive examples done with RT tech that I have seen, in this case EEVEE:

https://youtu.be/qG31WSioSxk [youtu.be]

But…Ian is a big fan of texture projection, and I suspect that he's using that technique extensively in this video. I doubt that something like this would work when a massive amount of polygons are needed.

Midphase

Werner Ziemerink
I must be the only person earth that do not like Redshift. The speed is great, but I am not sold on the quality.

There is definitely a “look” issue that I believe the RS team is aware of themselves (and have publicly acknowledged to some degree).

At the moment, the closest equivalent to CPU images that GPU renderers seem to be able to achieve is probably Octane who for some reason has gotten really maligned, perhaps unfairly so.

Is this all because of the biased vs. unbiased? I don't think so, although that's probably part of it. I feel the big elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is that GPU rendering requires workarounds and cheats that are inherent with the technology and which, at least for the time being, are simply not on par with the CPU equivalents. A good case-in-point is the overly-hyped RT ray-tracing that Nvidia RTX GPU's promise. Many people bought into it as providing the equivalent of CPU renders, except in real-time. The truth is that it doesn't, it relies on an extremely low sample count to extrapolate visual information that normally requires a lot more rays being cast. GPU rendering of course is different than RT, and considerably more refined, but still heavily reliant on workarounds in order to achieve what it does.

Ultimately what is production-acceptable or isn't depends on the needs of the production. I have seen extremely believable work done in RT engines, and I have seen extremely crappy and unrealistic renders done with Arnold. I think a lot depends on who is driving!

Here's one of the most impressive examples done with RT tech that I have seen, in this case EEVEE:

https://youtu.be/qG31WSioSxk [youtu.be]

But…Ian is a big fan of texture projection, and I suspect that he's using that technique extensively in this video. I doubt that something like this would work when a massive amount of polygons are needed.

And yet, although impressive results for the tech used, to my (admittedly trained eye), it looks like 10-15 years behind what offline rendering offers…

jarenas
And yet, although impressive results for the tech used, to my (admittedly trained eye), it looks like 10-15 years behind what offline rendering offers…

Of course, but it depends on what your needs are. For instance, if you're using something like EEVEE or UE to render some spaceships that fly off in the distance and are only on screen for a few seconds, that quality discrepancy might not really matter that much.

Having watched and studied Quixel's Rebirth short film, I think that some landscapes can work just fine as a RT render, while things like interiors (conspicuously absent in both Rebirth and Dynamo Dream) can be considerably tougher to sell due to their heavy dependency on accurate shadows, reflections and global illumination.

We have to remember that VFX are for the most part smoke and mirror magic tricks. The technology that we currently herald as state of the art will look downright cheesy to our eyes in a decade or so.

In 2020, it really comes down to whether it is an integer, 32bit or 64bit float renderer. I prefer to use integer renderers as there is no rounding error. It's more accurate, therefore more real.

Thoughts?

Call me crazy, but I'd rather go by how the renders look. Out of all the GPU renders at the moment, Octane wins hands down in that department. As far as CPU renders are concerned, I'd split it between Arnold and Vray.

I have no idea if any of them are integer renderers.

Midphase
Octane wins hands down

Octane is great! Been using it for years in C4D and Houdini.

SESI make karma production ready with GPU release so we don't have a render war.

Honestly every render has is pro and con. Select the render that fit's the requirement. Houdini has so many options today and with USD it just gets better.

Since I “modified” my post….I thougtht I'd get back to sharing…

https://www.facebook.com/ayman.abolilaa/videos/692503571485752/ [www.facebook.com]

Hi, I need to tell how I amazed about redshift as it fast and beautiful. I get same exact render from that simulation I did and rendered with mantra inside of houdini, here is the link of mantra version : https://vimeo.com/398311316 [vimeo.com]

the Mantra version looks more realistic imo - the light reflected on the fence from the lightning arcs is much more believable. albeit, the quality of the video is worse, but I'm not sure whether it's due to vimeo's encoding or the sequence being rendered at a lower res to compensate for the slower Mantra's rendering speed.
either way, the statement “I get same exact render from that simulation” is, I think, false.

@Daryl - thanks for sharing these posts, but in reality they represent hobby projects and don't show the GPU as a replacement for CPU renderers.

It would be great if you could link to the very best GPU rendering example you know of. We can then compare it to all the Hollywood work that is rendered on CPUs. That is what we class as a Production renderer. Thank you!

@goat - Use whatever engine meets your needs. I was merely sharing an option that was not mine.

There are fully functional demos for mostly all of the Hydra complaint engines, evaluate them for yourself.

@Daryl if I ever saw a case of backpedaling, this must be it. come on, man

in the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff - one doesn't even need a big production scenario. in your posted example, Mantra realistically evaluates the lighting solution, while RS, doesn't.
light from lightning is a lot brighter than that from sparks, yet in the RS render it doesn't seem to be the case.
it might be user error, I don't know, but please don't pretend that it's not real.
I'm being genuinely puzzled, I don't presume any bad faith from your part…