CGI Сoffee

Posted in Software on June 22, 2016

Tried it. Amazed. Can't stop playing with the new Redshift! Volume rendering works like a charm with blazing speeds even with brute force GI enabled with about 500 samples! Crazy!

Tell me those are not some pretty clouds:

And this is not some heavy but oh so beautiful cloud of thick smoke:

Each of these renders took about 10 seconds on my nVidia Geforce GTX 970. Mind you this is not a powerful GPU anymore! According to preliminary tests GTX 1080 is twice as fast! Put four of those babies inside one big tower, grab a copy of Redshift and you've got your very own render farm that can render anything and fast! At least that's what I will do when the time comes to render the movie out.

Well, it's official. Redshift renderer is the best GPU rendering engine on the market! Well done guys!

And let me also thank Redshift team for supporting Softimage folk. You guys deserve a medal for this.

Posted in Software on June 22, 2016

After a long period of beta-testing version 2.0.44 of Redshift has finally been made available for everyone to try and play with.

If you don't know what Redshift3D is, it's a biased GPU renderer unlike many other GPU path tracers out there. To put it simply - it's like a supercharged VRay with all biased goodness like irradiance caching, photon mapping and precalculated SSS. Together with the new OpenVDB support it all makes Redshift a blast to work with.

Literally.

Here's what's new in 2.0 VS 1.3:

All V1.3 features PLUS:

• New “Redshift Material” which more closely follows the PBR paradigms (“metalness”, etc)
• New specular BRDFs (on top of the Ashikhmin-Shirley): GGX and Beckmann (Cook-Torrance)
• Nested dielectrics
• Multiple dome lights
• Baking
• Dispersion (part of the Redshift Material)
• OpenVDB Support
• Improved multiple-scattering model (part of the SSS, Skin and Redshift Material)
• Single scattering (part of the Redshift Material)
• Support for alSurface shader
• Linear specular glossiness/roughness response
• Improved photon mapping accuracy for complex materials
• Physically-correct Fresnel for rough reflections
• New SubSurfaceScattering and SubSurfaceScatteringRaw AOV types
• AOV improvements for blended materials
• NVidia Pascal GPU (GTX1070/1080) support
• Automatic memory management
• Better importance sampling of bokeh images
• Texture reference object support (Maya)

You can join the discussion on the official Redshift forums.

Posted in CGI on May 15, 2016

Latest CGI-to-live action experiment:

Rendered with Redshift 1.3 for Softimage, composed in After Effects. Mostly polishing the new HDRI map creation pipeline for realistic IBL-rendering with a raytracer. Imrod 3d model taken from TF3DM.

Posted in Tips and tricks on April 28, 2016

Since Autodesk officially EOL'd Softimage, XSI blogs and discussion groups have been gradually vanishing from the web which is a shame.

As a tribute to the great piece of software that Softimage is I will try to consolidate the most useful XSI-related stuff from the net.

Today we have a Softimage hotkeys infographic originally posted at XSIBase which is now non-existent. It's just too good to just perish so here are cleaned up versions in glorious PNG.

Read more

Posted in CGI on April 18, 2016

Did you know that Blizzard used Redshift3D to render some of those Overwatch animated short films? The ones titled "Recall" and "Alive", to be specific.

Things are starting to look better and better for Redshift. I myself am planning to use the renderer to produce a short film I'm currently working on. More info on that later.

Posted in Personal on April 01, 2016

My very own blog is finally up and running. I'd like to sincerely thank my good friend Daniel Lesden who inspired me to begin publishing my thoughts online. Daniel is also an excellent music producer and has his own blog and a rave podcast which you should definitely check out.

And just for the record dare I say that HTMLy blogging platform is AWESOME?

Too bad there is no MySQL-driven version. Plain text files are good and all, but as soon as it starts getting interesting (I'm looking at you, tag-and-title-only-search), it becomes rather limited. But it will do for the time being.

What is this all about?

Here I will share my experience working with VFX and CGI software, industry news I find interesting and most importantly - will document my journey to create an animated short film!

This is going to be a long and exciting quest and I hope you find my ramblings and findings interesting on the way.

Let's do this!