Blender Discussions

[voidcore]

( In reference to the version released at siggraph 2019)

Hi, I have been alpha/beta testing RPR for more than a year. it is good to see the constant progress but for my needs there are still a lot of features missing.

This is just from a pragmatic point of view  that for a fact hinders me from using the renderer outside of beta testing and bug reporting.

The following is the most pressing ones that I come to think of any time I try to do something using RPR:

(All of these have been reported in one form or the other as bugs or feature requests.)

Can you give any feedback on this?

Texturing:

- trilinear/box mapping for things like CAD, arkviz and concept art where we don't want or can create UVs

(current implemtation doesn't work at all)

- Sampling from equirectangular images (like 360 captures) 

Volume rendering:

- homogenous volumes for things like distance fog, atmosphere etc

- hetergenous volumes that can use VDB data and built in noises

(current inmplementation supports only a limited set for smoke sims etc, no VDB no fog volumes for atmosphere)

Procedural noises:

- need at least some kind of 3D fBM, turbulent noise. For use in volumes and mixing of materials for example

- preferable advanced noises 

(currently only very basic 2d noise)

Other Nodes or part of nodes:

- Hue/Saturation node that works. For tweaking colors of textures etc.

- Object ID for setting per object properties like giving variation in shaders

- Transform betwen object space and world space . Especially useful for having box/trilinear mapping "hanging on" to an object or using world space.

Sky/sun

- possibility to set colors of the sky to unrealistic colors for effects (like creating a "Mars" sky or and underwater environment) The filer/tint is not enough here.

Displacement mapping

- It just doesn't work in a meaningful way at the moment.

Vertex colors

- use attributes on vertices for color or other uses 

Other features that would be nice to have that I have not reported before:

- 360/180 fisheye camera to create "domemaster" format renderings (hemisphere rendering)

- bevel shader/rounded corners without the need to change the geo.

Best regards

/Filip

[arozghon]

Thank you, Filip, for your suggestions, hope will added more features to the RPR future builds. 

[jl5086]

So is this still true, that there is no way for ProRender to render fog or atmospheric dust using volume to scatter in the world of a scene in Blender 2.8?   Because that really puts it miles behind both Cycles and luxcore Render, which are both Free, Opencl, integrated nicely into Blender's interface and can do volume in the atmosphere very nicely.  I can't even begin to consider how ProRender could possibly nail every other aspect of their plugin so well and leave this one out, I mean how many people really have much need to render objects in there scenes with smoke pouring from them anyways?

[voidcore]

Principled volume has been added since my post in September but it is buggy/weird so not useful. Or at least so different from how cycles handles volumes that I don't understand.

The other features are still missing or in the same state (unusable)

[jl5086]

      Thanks for the straight forward answer, I was kind of surprised that there was so little info on this available, and the ProRender website seems to imply that it should work, but at the same time is careful to mention there might be issues.  I think this is something most people who are considering this as a viable alternative render engine would really want to understand more clearly when reading it's features.  That said I really hope this is something that isn't going to take a long time to fix.  I have lately gone back and tried the latest Luxcore Render for blender and for a free open source renderer, it seems as fast as ProRender and can do world volumetrics great, although it does use it's own strange unique node system, in it's own node editor window in blender, it does give you the option to use the regular nodes and editor.  I was extremely impressed by how fast, stable and great the results are.  It shows the world volume and the post processing (film, bloom,chromatic aberration, vignette) live in the viewport render, without having to wait for the render to finish, like when using the compositor.  I suppose if this never gets sorted I may have to try using Luxcore regularly, unless I find some big downside to it.            

       I am sure I am not as knowledgeable as you are in this area, as I don't use a lot of the features of Blender or these renderers, but I am curious if Luxcore Render for blender has any of those features you wish list , which RPR is currently lacking, or if it just happens to do the volumetrics fine but is missing many other features.   If you have, or do, ever try Luxcore Renders most recent update I would love to know how it actually stacks up, from someone who obviously knows a lot, and knows what to look for when testing.

Thank you very much!