The world fastest unbiased renderer!

[SolaraSolarwind]

Take a look at this sandbox renderer. The developer seems to only use this for his own personal study. But it's very interesting and I wish it would be implemented in LuxRender.

http://www.bee-www.com/parthenon/

here's an article from the nvidia site from a chapter taken from GPUGems2 Chapter 38 on the concept behind the algorithms involved with this renderer.

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGem ... ter38.html

here are some of my own personal experiences with this renderer.

my system is Intel Pentium IV 1.7Ghz 1Gb RAM and Windows XP
I am using the latest Luxrender for windows and luxblend 0.6 R3

my renders were created in blender>exported as .3ds>then imported into metasequioa (a japanese 3d modeling program) so that it would be opened up in the "PARTHENON RENDERER"

This first image took about 50 seconds to render

This second image took about 1 minute to render

This third image took about 40 seconds to render

this image took about 1.7 seconds to render

and this monkey head took less than 30 seconds to render


I don't know how Toshiya's renderer is able to render these images to fast and have such high quality global illumination, but I wish we could have this algorithm in luxrender, that would make this one of the fastest Photorealistic renderers around!

[gagar]

Quite impressive.

It is not unbiased, though.

[Poncho]

GPU-power, Oh Yeah!

[SolaraSolarwind]

Here is a excerpt of someone else who was able to use this renderer. This might help you, if you are interested in testing it out for yourself.


"I had already done a little research before, because it reads the .mqo (Metasequoia) format, which is a Japanese thing (as is Parthenon). With the help of the creator of Parthenon I found an exporter for blender to .mqo, but Parthenon didn't really like the files created by this exporter. (so, if any of the file-format freaks reads this: there are a few example files in the zip that should be enough to show the structure)
Luckily, there's an alternative option: MetasequoiaLE. This program is the 'mother' of the .mqo format, but it imports all kinds of formats. I tried a few, but .OBJ appeared to be the best choice. Unfortunately this merges all the meshes into one object and it forgets all the material settings, BUT it does still have the materials applied to the right faces, so you just need to select the materials and redo the settings inside Metasequoia. Parthenon doesn't understand quads, so you need to convert it to triangles first (select all and then Selected > Triangulate ...). Then, when you save it, Parthenon should be able to open it!
To create lights, you can just set the emission value of an emitting object to something other than 0.

Well, that should be able to do the trick, but it's far for convenient, and I have not been able to get decent results yet from anything other than the example files (which are still really impressive!!!). IBL/HDRI is b0rked too.

I talked to the creator, and he is probably going to make an open-source version in the near future! Also, he will release a version that supports .OBJ import soon, which will be a very big improvement.

until then, I'd love to see if someone else can get this little toy to work with anything other than the example files

You'll need d3dx9_28.dll from this package too "

Hopefully this developer will provide the source code. I am just desparate for a photorealistic renderer that can render on the fly!

[jeanphi]

Hi,

This is interesting, but it's not an unbiased renderer. It's a biased GPU assisted GI renderer introducing some novel techniques, but it's not the same thing than LuxRender.

Jeanphi

[tomb]

As Jeanphi said - very interesting, but not unique GPU accelerated/realtime GI algorithms have been all the rage in CG research labs the last years; there's a ton of various
algorithms to achieve some form of GI on HW out there, some even with source code

The problem, AFAIK, is they are all making a lot of assumptions about the scene and/or materials (BxDFs) to achieve their "tricks" - either by simplifying the render equation
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_equation) so much the result is no longer physically plausible (even if still GI) or relying on heavy preprocessing - sometimes requiring quite
a lot of manual tweaking too - a priori to the rendering.

Either way, lux supports both biased and unbiased integrators as plugins so it's quite possible to integrate such techniques if anyone feels the itch There is a PBRT integrator for IGI
(Instant Global Illumination), for example, that could be reintroduced if someone with the skill and interest picks it up - it was moved to the "attic" some time ago due to lack of
interest in it.

T

[jeanphi]

Hi,

The IGI integrator of PBRT is working in my tree I've not pushed it because I'm not sure it's worth it as it introduces quite a lot of artifacts as soon as you have glossy materials.

Jeanphi

[psychotron]

good to hear
than IGI can be used for scenes with matte materials (like some fast clayrenders for preview)

[jeanphi]

Hi,

If you want I can add it to the repository.

Jeanphi

[psychotron]

yes please