Automotive CG Production, Problems & WIP

[supernoodles]

Hi guys, I am writing to ask a few questions which I have listed below, we are trying to find a good and viable Gpu based solution in our studio, I am aware that some of the questions below are not possible at the minute but would be great to get some feedback, on future developments, maybe some inside knowledge from octane developers, I am also aware that version 2 may solve some issues, but would would be great to get some clarification and advice on what is happening, please see my questions below, thanks in advance for any useful information and answers. My wish list / questions is below

1. Object Based Motion Blur? ;
Firstly object based motion blur particularly for car wheels, this is a must in automotive cg, I do know that i could use cinema4d’s subframe motion blur, but this requires rendering each still frame multiple times, and i know i could possibly achieve this with some kind of motion vector pass, but the post solutions just don’t look good enough, I believe version 2 might solve this, will it dramatically decrease render times, compared to rendering multiple frames and having cinema4d blur them together?

2. HDRI lighting with separate 2d Backplate photography? ;
Is their a solution for using a hdr/exr dome for lighting, whilst also using a photographic backplate image in the background within octane, I know I can do this after in post but in reality you need the backplate in the render whilst working so you can see how things are looking and matching up together?
I know all the cpu solutions within maya/modo and cinema have really easy integrated solutions for doing these tasks, can octane do the same. Just to confirm, I am talking about camera matching a 2d backplate whilst also using a HDR dome to light the scene. Still images is priority for us but animation would be amazing too.

3. HDRI lighting with direct lighting, for shadows and sun control? ;
Similar to the above question, Is their a good integrated solution in octane for using a direct light whilst also using a HDR dome for scene lighting,
This would be incredibly useful as it allows you to cast sharp/ direct shadows on the floor/shadowcatcher and also gives you another level of control for leveling the power of the sun without boosting your overall HDR dome, is this a possibility? This would also need to work with the above backplate query,

4. Firefly’s or Noise? ;
In my attached WIP image, after around 1500 samples, direct lighting, 2 hours rendering on an iMac with built in nvidea card, 1500ish cores , I am getting white noisy dots in the rear window and just below the wing mirror, in the reflection, these to me seem to be quite complex reflection and refraction areas of my scene, are these firflys or noise, the majority of the images seemed really clean after 600 - 800 samples but these areas would not seem to clean up.
I decided on the directlight kernel for this image as it seemed a lot faster than pmc, and also gave me desirable results, am i doing something wrong? or is this a limitation at the minute? Would PMC or PT be better, why do they seem to take so much longer to render, they give very similar results in our particular car scenes.

5. Real Render Passes, Spec, Refract, Reflec, Diffuse for compositing? ;
Will octane and gpu rendering ever get these? In the near future of course, from what I have read it just requires a lot of memory and to my understanding is the main issue with integrating these in a gnu solution, if so how much more memory in general would this use?

6. Tesla’s and Titans is the only benefit memory/ram in the realm of octane/gpu rendering? ;
Out of curiosity any good info on the benefits of one or the other? And when will we start seeing 32gb plus ram etc in graphics cards

7. Server side internal GPU hosting solutions ‘I don’t mean cloud services’? ;
This might seem like a silly reason but a lot of design houses and studios, will just not tolerate having noisy and unsightly graphics cards/ expander boxes lying around the studio, so what would would be the possibility of having a server hosting maybe 4 - 8 gpu cards, and then the artists being able to utilise these on their mac/windows workstations? similar to having a gpu expander but doing it over the network rather than having it directly attached to a workstation.
Similar to using a distributed rendering solution for single frames, will this be available in octane at some point, or even better could i do it now?

8. Standalone vs plugins, stability and limitations? ;
Are the plugin’s ‘we are using cinema4d’ buggy / unstable, sometimes we have a lot of crashes and this just not working, eg, adding an octane area light sometimes just doesn’t work then sometimes it does.
Also are their any things listed above or similar than work of behave better on the standalone version.

Thank you very much for reading, any info would be amazing, I know there are a lot of questions, but it would be amazing if octane could do all of the above! Image attached, Plus Closeup for Noise/Fireflys
Many thanks

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zl1bnra8743js ... BEAUTY.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1agkb4l7ianyw ... _noise.jpg

[aoktar]

well, i'll try to reply your questions.

I'm not sure that you are aware of incoming new release of 2.0. It has many new features. Please check first these:

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=39208
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38935
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=39059

1-yes

2-Cameramapping is possible. Seperate Hdr for lighting and reflection is not possible. But you can put a background.

3-yes, it's available in 2.0

4-this varies with settings and material, lighting options. Also you need bettter gpu's. I can do much faster renders on my system. 1500 samples and 2 hours is aweful. You should in a few minutes with some powerfull gpus.

5-yes, will be there in 2.x

6-

7-2.0 has new distributed rendering. It allows to use all gpus on registered clients.

8- This is interesting. Why do you thinking that's unstable? Which version is mentioned by you? Last versions should be very stabile mostly.

[supernoodles]

Hi Aoktar, Thank you for the reply, that has cleared a lot of things up!

Since my first post we have upgraded to the latest version and also upgraded our graphics cards, and the stability issues have drastically improved,

The issues we are still having are;

Things just not working ‘inconsistent’ Ie, creating an octane light, just won’t seem to emit any light at all, then sometimes it will,
Are there any issues with the octane area lights? Specifically when also lighting with a HDR ? I have tried this in both c4d and standalone, but inconsistent results, the lights just don’t seem to behave properly, they also seem too take along time to reduce the noise when they do work,

DR Rendering sounds amazing! So would this allow the user to utilise a server with a lot of gpu power inside, say 4-8 gpu cards? With just one licence on each machine? One server and another for the client workstation?
This would be great for new mac pro’s that can’t utilise nvidea cards at the moment! And also for sharing gpu power,

Any idea when separate reflect, lighting hdr’s will be available?

Version 2 sounds like its going to have a lot of new features! Hope it is all stable,

I have also fixed the firefly issue with the hot pixel tool, i’m not sure how it works/ exactly what it does though?

I think a lot of the issues we did have have been solved by using a separate gpu for rendering on,

King Regards, Alistair

[aoktar]

hi,
Last version is nearly very stabile, i did a few fixed but not published.
Lighting problems sounds to me very strange and i'm not sure what do you mean about unstabile lighting. I suppose there is a user problem with different materials, hdrs, etc.. You should use octane lighttag with arealights. Also each hdr can have different light intensity and behaves different. Best is that you may show me more spesific samples to help.

Dr Render uses all slaves which has a license and client slave software. So you can use all power of this machines from standalone or plugins. This works on a single frame or animation.

Any idea when separate reflect, lighting hdr’s will be available?

not yet

[supernoodles]

Thanks again! When I get some of these strange results again i will post them! Cant wait for version 2.0!
Cheers

[supernoodles]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zl1bnra8743js ... BEAUTY.jpg

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1agkb4l7ianyw ... _noise.jpg

These are my previous links I think they went dead