The BlurBeta Dev Journal has some new notes added early yesterday. Blur has not posted rendertimes so far since the code is still in development. They decided to post some times since there has been rendertimes quoted in the Umlat Comparison of Mental Ray vs Arnold. There has also been some big improvements in the speed of the standard raytracing
Here are the notes from the BlurBeta Developer Journal Site:
August 14, 2000 – Steve
These are the first official render times for the in development RayFX global illumination system. There are still a lot of optimizations to implement, but I decided once we got to this point, I’d post something. When all this started, renders like these were taking 20+ hours, so we’ve come a long way already. Still a bit of grain though.
This first image is 1,479,114 faces / 953 objects
One shadow mapped spotlight, skylight, and global illum depth to 2
800×600
44 min. 41 sec.
This image is 500,728 faces / 294 objects
One raytraced light, skylight, and global illum depth to 5
800×600
1 hour 12 min.
I prettied it up in Digital Fusion a bit.
The additional render time for the second image was mainly due to the increase in light bounces. The shiny spheres were pretty slow too. I’m working on this stuff now so this time will improve soon. Compare this to mental ray and Arnold’s times and at this point RayFX is already competitive for similar image quality.
August 13, 2000 – Steve
The final piece just snapped into place. I have a solution to antialiasing performance on top of everything yesterday. We had been working out an approach for some time, and it all just clicked together. It will be a 2 render pass system (the right way to do it), may allow us to implement Depth of Field, and will not require changes to Max.
I leave you with this sick little benchmark…6 reflective Tamers in a reflective box:
1,479,114 faces / 952 objects
Rendered at 2048×1536 (no antialiasing) resampled to 800×600 in Digital Fusion using the Mitchell filter.
Max Trace Depth: 2
Max’s memory usage: 450 Mb to open file, additional 150 Mb for rendering (max only)
Render times are with me tweaking the acceleration to get the best performance for that build. Time is measured from when I hit render until the last scanline is written, so includes renderer prep, shadow map calculation, and raytracer setup time. Machine used was a dual P3-550.
Max 3.1 shipping build: 54 min. 47 sec. (~350 Mb used for acceleration)
public beta 2.03 build: 13 min. 34 sec. (226 Mb used for acceleration)
today’s build: 6 min. 52 sec. (217 Mb used for acceleration)
When rendering at 800×600 (no antialiasing), Max takes just over 1 min. to prep, the raytracer takes 1 min 20 secs. to prep, and the render takes just 46 seconds.
I will discuss all this more later. I have work to do…
