Hi!

i always do a render time test before and after a new update,
this time you write up to 10% faster that sounded interesting,
in my test scene i got with 59 sec before update and 54/56 secs
after, so it looks good on my GTX 970.

Here is my latest wishlist for furryball, in somewhat of a priority order:

1. Adaptive ray sampling.
2. Caustics. I know they kind of exist but i need more intensity and faster rendering.
3. Reflection and refraction max distance. Like in Mental Ray, very useful visually, but can also be used to speed up rendering.
4. Prune / clip / remove spotty rays (fireflys).
5. Visibility and visibility strength (0.0 - 1.0) of area light shape.
6. Round edges normalmap, like MR or Vray.
7. SSS falloff and intensity. SSS should be able to be very intense towards white, for example if the light source is very bright
or close to the sss object. Right now its maximum intensity is only that of the sss color, 255,255,0 will not continue towards
255,255,255.
8. SSS back scattering. Two sided scattering that can have different colors.

BUGS
# Isolate select in one view also translates to render window even if other views do not have isolate select. I think this might
be a feature rather than a bug, but i find it to be a somewhat strange behavior. Ideally isolate select should only be considered
in the render window if that view is selected.
# Lanczos filter type makes black artifacts (maybe SOLVED in the latest rev, it seems like it)
# Some render layers crashes maya (SOLVED in latest rev thanks!)
# Turning off and on displacement in features will make displacement stay off and also inflate the object
# I get many fatal error crashes when turning on IPR render window, pretty random but seems to happen more often when
maya has been running for a while. It always resolves for at least the first render if maya is restarted, so it seems memory or
cache related. I am using maya 2017.

Thanks!

Thanks we will look on it deeply, but this speed is weird.
Are you sure, you have compiled all effect after you installed new version and NOT count this compile time to your compare time?
(After new release the compile times of effects are slower for the first time)

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All the Best
Jan

Hello,

i am not exactly sure how you mean that is weird since my rendering test after update
was in line with the performance boost you had specified? About 5 seconds faster is a
8-9% speedup in my case, after i updated to the latest build 1.4.3997.

To be clear i use my own test scene and not the furryball benchmark scene, but i think
you understood that.

You are right that the very first time that i rendered my scene, i was surprised to see a
pretty big slowdown of the test scene render. I got 80 seconds the very first time. But
after a restart i consistently get 54/55/56 secs compared to my 59 secs with the earlier
version. The 59 second number was only from a single test, i should have tested it a
couple of times also.

- A correction to my bugs entry about lanczos filtering. It does indeed still give artifacts,
i had tested it with too low samples. Uniform and Gaussian works fine, but lanczos will
get much black noise all over the image when i have a high primary rays number.

OH sorry, I read your text badly - I meant that the last release is SLOWER that older one.
Ok.
Of course speed up % depends on your scene - it could be various in each scene how much GPU is loaded.

_________________
Thank you for contacting us.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

All the Best
Jan

Hi,
I answer to some question, other I must deeply test or we add it into our todo list:

1. Adaptive ray sampling.
We looked at it before, however it is impossible to be implemented into our sample distribution algorithm.

3. Reflection and refraction max distance. Like in Mental Ray, very useful visually, but can also be used to speed up rendering.
There is global ray tracing Max Ray Length attribute in render settings (see documentation)

4. Prune / clip / remove spotty rays (fireflys).
What do you mean by this?

5. Visibility and visibility strength (0.0 - 1.0) of area light shape.
I don't know if it has same effect, but try to set texture into color attribute of area light.

7. SSS falloff and intensity...
I don't understand what do you mean. Try to play with sss intensity (it can be greater than 1, also sss color can be greater than 1), radius, roughness, use surface color and diffuse radius attributes.

8. SSS back scattering. Two sided scattering that can have different colors.
Try use FurryBall double side material and set two different materials into it with different sss settings.

# Isolate select in one view
Yes, it is feature, you can control what you want to render in render settings node -> Renderables - You can render any object set of your scene (see documentation)

# Lanczos filter type makes black artifacts (maybe SOLVED in the latest rev, it seems like it)
Yes, you are right, Lanczos filter is hard to set (greater radius must be used), however it can be used only in some scenes. We maybe remove it from the list in newer releases.