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wmigda
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Renderer engine alternatives - redux

Hello all,

tha subject has already been brought here previously (http://www.sweethome3d.com/support/forum/viewthread_thread,2266_lastpage,yes). The evidence presented elsewhere shows that SunFlow does a good job (e.g. here http://www.sweethome3d.com/support/forum/viewthread_thread,2200). Good looking it might be, from my point of view it requires all the advanced knowledge to actually force the engine to give results similar to the real life ones.

One of the things which annoy me most with the default renderer is the light handling. There is a small test - three colored cubes taken from the default library having shininess turned on, placed on a matt white cube inside an interior lightet with a morning sun. I would expect the shiny cubes to reflect some of the colored light onto the environment, and especially on the white box they lay on.

Here's the clickable output:
Default renderer, colored boxes with unchanged material:


Default renderer, colored boxes with shiny material:


Advanced photo renderer, silk setting, colored boxes with unchanged material:


Advanced photo renderer, silk setting, colored boxes with shiny material:


I would expect the boxes to reflect colored light onto the white underlying box. With the advanced photo creation (silk setting) there is some colored shading on the wall behind them, but otherwise the white box remains unchanged. Also, the advanced photo plugin does a much better job with the ambient light created based on actual interior layout. However, it still has a problem with the floor texture in the shaded area on the right of the rendered picture where is it drawn in plain colour.

So the question remains whether SunFlow is capable of this rather basic expectance or not. If so, then is it a matter of some settings I missed (which ones?). Otherwise I'm advocating for the extension of SH3D capabilities with another rendering engine (be it Yafaray, LuxRender, Cycles, etc.).
[Oct 2, 2011, 3:19:57 PM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Puybaret
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

Reflections are set to a minimum value to avoid too long rendering process.
See this thread for more information.

By the way, the Advanced photo plug-in is not maintained.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
[Oct 2, 2011, 5:23:02 PM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
wmigda
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

I played with SunFlow GI settings today, just as it was shown in the thread you've quoted and it's way too heavy and with ugly results. Then I took blender and yafaray and with manual in hand and yafaray forum I managed to get satisfactory results.

Below is a 56 second rendering in Yafaray 0.1.1+Blender 2.49b, Pentium IV 3.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, (all compiled under gentoo with SSE2 optimizations)



Even with the noise present (which is a matter of tweaking rendering params) IMO it beats SunFlow by several headlengths. Now I'm even more convinced it's a thing to look at as a nice feature for SH3D.

Best regards,

Wojciech
[Oct 4, 2011, 8:32:45 PM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Puybaret
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

Very nice results! Is it a room created in Sweet Home 3D, then imported into Blender and Yafaray?

My main problem about trying other solutions is time!
I spent with others contributors a huge amount of time tweaking SunFlow parameters and fixing bugs in this library to get the current rendering. As SunFlow isn't really maintained anymore, I even wondered if I shouldn't have better translate from Yafaray into Java.

You should also notice that many users are satisfied by the current result and expect more new features like multiple levels and roof management, than a better rendering.

A first approach could be to develop a plug-in able to translate Sweet Home 3D / Java 3D data in a format supported by Yafaray (you can have a look to OBJWriter and PhotoRenderer classes to get ideas), then launch Yafaray renderer with the exec method of the Runtime class. Who wants to try?
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
[Oct 5, 2011, 8:42:43 AM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
wmigda
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

Very nice results!


Thank you :)

Is it a room created in Sweet Home 3D, then imported into Blender and Yafaray?


Exactly. However, there were some minor things to tweak - missing sun, sky light setup, and I think I had to change the glass material in the windows. I also played with the walls material. On a sidenote - I know SH3D cannot export sun position to the OBJ file, but maybe some sort of a dummy object could be placed just to mark the coordinates ?
Also, the imported mesh is very small in the blender viewport - scaling is necessary. Yesterday I estimated that to have 1 metre from the original SH3D project correspond to 1 blender unit the mesh has to be rescaled by a factor of about 14.84.

My main problem about trying other solutions is time!

I know what you're talking about :) I'm a pro programmer myself, and I rarely have time to develop sth besides that.

As SunFlow isn't really maintained anymore, I even wondered if I shouldn't have better translate from Yafaray into Java.

Translating C/C++ to Java ? Please, don't, performance will deteriorate significantly. I'm not a java expert, maybe it would be just sufficient to provide a similar solution just like in blender - having an export plugin to the standalone yafaray binary executable ?

You should also notice that many users are satisfied by the current result and expect more new features like multiple levels and roof management, than a better rendering.

Well, let's hope that power of Open Source will kick in and you'll find a helping hand.

A first approach could be to develop a plug-in able to translate Sweet Home 3D / Java 3D data in a format supported by Yafaray (you can have a look to OBJWriter and PhotoRenderer classes to get ideas), then launch Yafaray renderer with the exec method of the Runtime class. Who wants to try?


I thought about it. Right now I'm additionally busy with arranging my new appartment - that's why SH3D found my desktop ;) But who knows.. I don't want to promise anything.
[Oct 5, 2011, 9:49:51 AM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
wmigda
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

Hi,

I pretty much sure there is some sort of a problem with material assignment when the model is exported to the OBJ format. I can see that after adding/removing certain pieces furniture from the model and exporting it to the OBJ file some objects have wrong material applied (as seen in blender), e.g. glass panes in windows have a material of a book from a tv stand, or from a ground texture.

Is it a known problem or I should report it ?

-Wojciech
[Oct 6, 2011, 7:53:59 PM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Puybaret
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

Translating C/C++ to Java ? Please, don't, performance will deteriorate significantly.
For this kind of computing, I don't think so. I would prefer to avoid it but if it's the only way to integrate the image generation in Sweet Home 3D, I'll have to do it one day.

[About OBJ files imported in Blender] Is it a known problem or I should report it ?
I don't think there's a problem in OBJ / MTL generation. Blender proposed many parameters at OBJ importation time. Did you try to play with them?
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
[Oct 7, 2011, 6:23:16 AM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Puybaret
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Re: Renderer engine alternatives - redux

For your information, Phil Jordan recently made a performance test of some photo rendering engines, including Yafaray, and published his conclusions in this article of the blog.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
[Aug 25, 2018, 2:17:54 PM] Show Printable Version of Post    View Member Profile    Send Private Message [Link] Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
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