Today, we are providing a preview of Radeon™ ProRender with Full Spectrum Rendering in a beta Windows® 10 plug-in for Blender™ 2.80. This gives artists a viewport that can be scaled from super-fast rasterized to fully ray-traced, all with physically accurate materials and lighting. You can download the beta plug-in from here.
What is Full Spectrum Rendering?
In essence, Full Spectrum Rendering is an extension of Radeon ProRender beyond "just" a path-traced renderer using OpenCL™. We use the same Radeon ProRender SDK but have a different rendering backend for Full Spectrum Rendering. This new rendering backend uses rasterization to render the scene like many game engines or the EEVEE viewport renderer in Blender. However, it uses Vulkan® for faster rendering and then can add ray-traced effects such as reflection, refraction, and ambient occlusion. These effects are achieved using compute shaders and smart denoising. The end effect of the renderer is to harness all the power of the GPU, including taking advantage of GPU ray tracing acceleration where available. Dialing up or down these effects is what allows Full Spectrum Rendering to scale for speed and quality.
The other great part here is for developers. Minimal changes to the Blender plug-in were made to take advantage of this. And using the universal Radeon ProRender SDK allows the developer and user to change the quality and speed of rendering in only a few lines of code.
Why do I need Full Spectrum Rendering?
There are two huge benefits for artists with this implementation of Radeon ProRender: it is an all-in-one solution, and it helps to fill a wide gap between OpenGL® viewports (such as EEVEE) and full path-tracers (like Cycles). Most of these benefits are realized in the viewport, for lookdev: setting up scenes, and changing lighting, shaders, etc. Now users can get a more interactive experience like EEVEE with more physically correct soft shadows and reflections and refractions. Furthermore, these are done without the user having to set up light probes or do any other manual tasks. Finally, the quality/speed settings can be changed for more interactive or physically correct lighting and shading based on the user's needs.
How to use it.
For now, the beta plug-in only support Windows 10 with Full Spectrum Rendering (Linux® is supported in the Radeon ProRender SDK). Download and install the plug-in and select Radeon ProRender as your default renderer in Blender. Switch your viewport to rendered mode, and the rendering will start. There will be an "RPR" menu in the viewport which, if you click on it, will offer the options for Low, Medium, High and Full render settings. (Full uses the OpenCL full path-tracer, while all the others are using Vulkan).
For best results, use Blender's Principled material on your models. A few interesting things to try are:
- Interacting with the scene, moving, scaling objects around
- Changing shaders
- Changing lighting
- Changing the RPR quality settings and observing differences in interactivity and in lighting quality.
Thanks for trying it out, and as this is a new product, we look forward to your feedback!
DOWNLOAD THE BETA PLUG-IN NOW
Brian Savery is a Professional Graphics Software Development Manager for AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-5
Blender is a registered trademark of the Blender Foundation in EU and USA. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos Group Inc. OpenGL® and the oval logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Vulkan and the Vulkan logo are registered trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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