Rendertest Project
This project is an attempt to create a system for renderer comparisions. It can be interesing for anyone who is interested in rendering because it should be helpful to decide what difficulties you can expect if you change your workflow from one renderer to another. Or simply to see how rendering of the same scene works with different renderers.
Since I usually use Maya for scene creation, I first try to check the renderers which are available for Maya as there are:
- Solidangle's Arnold
- Pixar's Renderman
- Chaos Groups VRay (if I can find a evaluation version)
- 3Delight
- Redshift
- Appleseed (even if it does not yet offer all needed features)
Some of them offer a free fully featured evaluation license, what is really cool. I'd like to test some other renderer but then I have to transfer the whole scene to another package. These renderers are:
- Guerilla render
- Cycles
- Mantra
To avoid as much as possible any shader conversion, I will first create my own surface shader called hSurface (for Haggi's Surface). I can create it as OSL shader for VRay, 3Delight, Appleseed and Arnold. Others will require a C++ approach.On one side it will help to simplify shading, on the other side it will show how renderers work with user defined shaders.
There are some renderers which do no allow the usage of user defined shaders, but are nevertheless interesting. Among these are Rendshift, Guerilla Render and others. So I will try to transfer the hSurface attributes to the native shaders if possible.
I will document the progress in the following steps in blog entries which will show the problems and solutions on my way.
The project milestones are (the milestones will be clickable as soon as the progress arrives it):
- Create and test hSurface with shaderball test scene in Maya
- Transfer shaderball scenes to other 3d or render packages like Houdini, Blender, Guerilla
- Design and build a complex test scene
- Shade and texture the scene
- Create interesing lighing for the scene
- Render with Maya plugin renderers
- Transfer production scene to other 3D packages
- Render with these other packages
- Relax and celebrate the end of the project
If you have suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Last update: 01.2021