October contest entry

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October contest entry

Postby Aethelraed_Unraed » Sun Oct 04, 2015 5:27 pm

Hervor claims Tyrfing
Part of the 13th-century Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, the shieldmaiden Hervor goes to the mound of her late father to claim her inheritance, the legendary sword Tyrfing. Knowing of the curse laid on his sword, her draugr*-turned father Angantýr tries his best to dissuade her daughter from claiming the weapon...

* A draugr is an Old-Norse undead creature, usually but not universally malevolent.

“One who wanders | towards those mounds,
alone through the night, | nighs his death.
Look! Oh my - | the mounds are alight!
The earth is on fire, | flee for your life!”

- Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, Iceland, 13th century -

It's still a bit noisy, but I can't bear any longer rendering time than the 2 hours it already takes :| Perhaps if I've got some time to spare, I will upload a less noisy image.

Tools used:
- Makehuman
- MakeClothes
- Blender
- Gimp

External resources used:
- Seamless rock texture by hhh316
- Seamless grass texture by seamless-pixels.blogspot.com
- Various free tree models from Medievalworlds
- Rocks generated using the Rock Generator
Attachments
hervor13.png
Last edited by Aethelraed_Unraed on Mon Oct 26, 2015 12:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: October contest entry

Postby grinsegold » Sun Oct 04, 2015 7:22 pm

Aethelraed_Unraed wrote:It's still a bit noisy, but I can't bear any longer rendering time than the 2 hours it already takes :| Perhaps if I've got some time to spare, I will upload a less noisy image.

What does your pc when you are asleep? And apart from rendering over night, i wonder if you used every possible method to reduce noise, such as:
-despecle node
-clamp direct/indirect rays
-disabling caustic render if not needed
-reduce glossy bounces
-sharp glossy materials often cause fireflies. Make it unglossy but for the camera (Lightpath node→"is camera ray")

Rendertime can be reduced as well, e.g. by separating the objects into different renderlayers with individual sampling settings. Or maybe you could decrease the number of grass particles and increase the child particles instead. Make a weight painted map to prevent grass from growing outside the camera view. I really am surprised that you still have that much noise after two hours. You don't render with your mobile, don't you?
Would be a shame to leave it like that. I like your historical topics.
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Re: October contest entry

Postby joepal » Sun Oct 04, 2015 7:42 pm

My render settings for GPU rendering, tweaked for noise reduction and speed while maintaining reasonable quality:

settings.png


I usually render 2000 passes in four minutes at this resolution with multiple MH characters in the scene (admittedly I have multiple so-so high-end nvidia cards in the workstation).

These are just ad hoc settings after experimenting and some minor googling though, no big theory behind it. There are probably more efficient setups.

For indoors scenes the new light portal feature of blender 2.75 does wonders too.
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Re: October contest entry

Postby joepal » Sun Oct 04, 2015 7:47 pm

For tweaking settings and getting a comparison with other people's setups, try this thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... pdated-BMW)

Massive list of render times is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
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Re: October contest entry

Postby Aethelraed_Unraed » Sun Oct 04, 2015 8:55 pm

grinsegold wrote:
Aethelraed_Unraed wrote:It's still a bit noisy, but I can't bear any longer rendering time than the 2 hours it already takes :| Perhaps if I've got some time to spare, I will upload a less noisy image.

What does your pc when you are asleep? And apart from rendering over night, i wonder if you used every possible method to reduce noise, such as:
-despecle node
-clamp direct/indirect rays
-disabling caustic render if not needed
-reduce glossy bounces
-sharp glossy materials often cause fireflies. Make it unglossy but for the camera (Lightpath node→"is camera ray")

Rendertime can be reduced as well, e.g. by separating the objects into different renderlayers with individual sampling settings. Or maybe you could decrease the number of grass particles and increase the child particles instead. Make a weight painted map to prevent grass from growing outside the camera view. I really am surprised that you still have that much noise after two hours. You don't render with your mobile, don't you?
Would be a shame to leave it like that. I like your historical topics.
As a student in a one-room apartment, I can choose between either rendering or a good night's sleep, not both as my laptop runs at full fan speed when rendering ;)

I did use all the noise reducing methods you mentioned and then some, except making sharp glossy materials non-glossy for everything but the camera (I really doubt it'd make much difference as the only sharp glossy material is Hervor's sword), and different render layers.

Anyway the two main culprits are the grass/hair particles and the fog. I tried 2 different sample settings at 10% of the resolution, the results are below (both 400 samples/pixel). While setting the volume sampling settings to the bare minimum (right) does cut back the render times by about 1.5 and clearly improves the noise, the much better fog of the image on the left is something I cannot miss.

joepal wrote:My render settings for GPU rendering, tweaked for noise reduction and speed while maintaining reasonable quality:

The attachment settings.png is no longer available


I usually render 2000 passes in four minutes at this resolution with multiple MH characters in the scene (admittedly I have multiple so-so high-end nvidia cards in the workstation).

These are just ad hoc settings after experimenting and some minor googling though, no big theory behind it. There are probably more efficient setups.

For indoors scenes the new light portal feature of blender 2.75 does wonders too.
I have an ATI GPU, so with the current blender support (2.76rc3) it doesn't make any difference in render times at best, with a huge amount of added instability (at least better than blender 2.75, where GPU rendering didn't even work) :roll:
That said, I do have a fast CPU so usually I can render scenes in reasonable amounts of time. My Hadubrand August entry was rendered in something like 30 minutes.

Anyway, I'll try an overnight render sometime this week. I should just get about 550 samples/pixel before I wake up :)
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Re: October contest entry

Postby Aethelraed_Unraed » Sun Oct 04, 2015 11:53 pm

joepal wrote:For tweaking settings and getting a comparison with other people's setups, try this thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... pdated-BMW)

Massive list of render times is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
I just tried the BMW benchmark. I eventually got my ATI GPU to compute flawlessly, which I thought was quite a feat in itself, but the results are not good:
GPU: 06:12.55
CPU: 04:53.18
(However by optimising the tile size I can improve the render times to 04:33.07 on GPU vs 04:38.87 on CPU)

So the GPU renders barely any faster than the CPU. My CPU seems to get me to at least the faster half of the recent CPU benchmarks, and actually isn't so bad compared to most other systems on GPU, which are mostly in the 1-2 minute range.
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Re: October contest entry

Postby joepal » Mon Oct 05, 2015 7:54 am

You'll probably have to spend like 100-200 euro on a reasonably recent card for GPU rendering to be worth it over an equally recent CPU setup. That is (probably) the same for ATI and nVidia, although I haven't bought an ATI card since the mid 90's.
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Re: October contest entry

Postby grinsegold » Mon Oct 05, 2015 10:28 am

Try this:
Make a duplicate of your scene and disable the grass and fog layers, with background transparent. Use the disabled grass scene layer as mask layer to prevent the feet from showing up. Alpha over this onto the first scene render. This way the noise will only be at the grass, which shouldn't be that noticeable, and even less if you make your grass less uniform.
Or maybe you render just the fog in the one render layer and all the rest in another and then alpha over it.
Think you are right with the glossy sword. The fireflies would look different, less uniform and brighter. It's the fog. Guess it is volumetric. Try the "is camera ray"-trick there. Put a holdout node for everything but the camera.
Or you leave that path completely and do the fog in a different way. The easiest method is the mist pass of course, but there are other approaches as well. E.g. you could use the normalized z-pass to mix in white (fog) depending on the distance to the camera. Look at this tut from the ingenious Bartec Skorupa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPo2LroCU9A
But i guess that's not what you want since the fog wouldn't hover. Maybe you create a plane that's hovering over the grass (projected shrink wrap with offset?) and make it transparent, with a gradient texture, maybe with added noise patterns.

And you should try painting some simple semi-transparent white gradients in gimp to screen them onto your raw fog-less image, since there are only few things that are easier to paint than that.
Another tip to speed up the render is to use the addon which automatically chooses the right render tile size - unfortunately i don't remember the propper name at the moment. Make it default. It should be - in my oppinion.

Oh, and what is casting the shaddow that's behind the zombie?
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Re: October contest entry

Postby Aethelraed_Unraed » Mon Oct 05, 2015 2:21 pm

joepal wrote:You'll probably have to spend like 100-200 euro on a reasonably recent card for GPU rendering to be worth it over an equally recent CPU setup. That is (probably) the same for ATI and nVidia, although I haven't bought an ATI card since the mid 90's.
Besides sleeping in the same small room as my laptop, a lack of money is another problem of student life :) I do have a reasonably good GPU though, the only problem is that ATI support has only been included since Blender 2.75, and is still quite buggy. Most of the times when I try GPU rendering, Blender just crashes and half the times it doesn't I just get a black image. It definitely did improve compared to 2.75 though, in 2.75 it was actually 10x slower than CPU on my rig, so I hope the next Blender brings some more improvements.

grinsegold wrote:Think you are right with the glossy sword. The fireflies would look different, less uniform and brighter. It's the fog. Guess it is volumetric. Try the "is camera ray"-trick there. Put a holdout node for everything but the camera.
Damn, why didn't I think of this myself? I use the "only-camera"-trick all the time. :roll: Tried it, and it was a free 25% speedup compared to the original image, with no discernible difference in the result.

Good question about the shadow by the way, there isn't anything casting it and it doesn't show up in my viewport (and isn't an object only visible in the render). Will look into it.
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Re: October contest entry

Postby grinsegold » Mon Oct 05, 2015 3:58 pm

Aethelraed_Unraed wrote:..., with no discernible difference in the result.


Then it is most likely not the fog but the fire. Is its emitting value far over 1? Dial it down and cheat with a spot-, point- and/or an arealamp. And the is-camera-thingy of course (camera gets more emittng power to be able to easily separate it later when applying glares if needed).
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