I miss 7.0b26

I miss 7.0b26

It's depressing to me that the thing that most excited me about Falcon is no more. I want it back as an option, even if it's broken for complex stuff it's great for most things and not having it is simply worse.
 

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:) Misoversaturated:
Your Glass Vase and Twisted ornaments render is Stunning . . .
as practically everything you put out ! ! !
The whole composition is brilliant:
* The unique artistic shape of the Vase and ornaments
* The Render studio:​
* Your background
*Your lighting
*The reflection on the glass
*Is there a tiny bit of dof?​

I also like your render of the rose pig.
I was trying for a long time to produce a procedural Rose Quartz Material.
Rose Quartz comes in deeper tones as well as much lighter tones of rose.
Hoping to change the tone according to the tone that works best with what I’m trying to accomplish -
I’m thinking the material and lighting set up for your rose colored glass pig would be the ticket for a polished rose quartz.
Could you possibly give details of how you accomplished it or even better yet post your file?
I understand if you can’t.

My Best
Jeanny
 
Love the caustic-heavy renders, but my extra point is that even things that aren't supposed to emphasize caustics look more drab and flat without them, and setting lights to raytrace+transparency is often terrible.
 
Opps.
My comments only involved the unique effect that misoversaturated created.
and . . .
The effect misoversaturated achieved with the Pink Pig that may help me make a rose quartz type material.

Concerning caustics . . . I too miss it.
I have some files that I no longer can work with because of the lack of caustics.
But then again . . . is it ok or not just to use the last beta version that still had caustics?

I am pretty ignorant concerning working with 3D applications.
I'm just a tiny fish floundering about in a vast ocean.
No mater how hard or long I try I don’t have enough computer or 3D background to accomplish what I would really like to.
So . . . I have to rely mostly on whatever my brain will glean from forum posts and happy accidents.

Never-the-less I am grateful for what I can achieve.

Thank you Martin, podperson, misoversaturated and all the other 3D gurus.


My Best
Jeanny
 
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Agreed

In my case two recent version 7 updates actually reduced value. I would prefer to keep the option of Falcon refraction caustics unless it’s a technical dead end for future C3D development. I am guessing Martin has future materials in progress (sub-surface scattering) that would be incompatible with the original Falcon.

Meanwhile I am OK because I have retained beta 25, 7.1.1, and 7.2.1.

https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=111239&postcount=8

I first bought version 4 because it was the best option to add radiosity rendering to Amapi models. Then I shifted all my modeling to C3D. I have no compelling need to use a different renderer (e.g. Blender) but maybe we will evolve to have one that can be integrated into C3D like Falcon.
 
I was trying for a long time to produce a procedural Rose Quartz Material.
Rose Quartz comes in deeper tones as well as much lighter tones of rose.

Thanks Jeanny for your comment!

For the scene with vase: No DOF, but blurry HDRI :smile:
For the transparent pig:
Googling rose quartz I found out it comes in different varieties:
Clear or cloudy and everything in between.
For the cloudy crystals we would need subsurface scattering on which Martin is working I guess but it's not there yet.
Clear quartz should be doable (IOR 1,544) with the dielectric shader.
Maybe you could post a scene in a new thread with the light setup and I could assemble a rose quartz material for you.

I'm providing the pig scene and the HDRI file which is crucial for the effect but please remember in this thread we're rendering with older beta versions that still use a transparent caustic engine. Rendered with the release version it will look different, also because the older beta versions had a different dielectric shader with different transparence and absorption colors which I use here and it helps with color differentiation, again a feature not available any more in the current release.

View attachment transpig.jas.zip screenshot.png

I strongly recommend to keep older beta versions for caustic renders, even when combinations with newer features like soft shaded lights are not possible that way.​


... my extra point is that even things that aren't supposed to emphasize caustics look more drab and flat without them ...

Good point, I found out about that playing around with LuxRender, the Bidirectional renderer with Metropolis Sampling creates the scene and the caustic pattern quickly albeit noisy and then takes a very long time to add highlights within the glass body, due to the quirks of the metropolis algorithm.

I prefer the brute force approach of the early Cheetah betas and Cycles because though slow they show the right light balance from the beginning.

Also Cheetah as of beta 26 has a reflection bug concerning nonphysical lights (they don't reflect no matter the visibility setting), only meshlights with solid or emissive materials are reflected correctly.
 
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:D Thanks so much misoversaturated for responding to my quest for help.

I’m really excited about your reply.
I put the file temporarily on the shelf so it will take a little while to drag it out
and put together an explanation along with examples of what I’m trying to achieve.
I won’t be able to work on it until tonight but I’m looking forward to doing so.

Thanks so much for the information you have already provided and for including your file and HDRI.
I only saved 7.0b26
Will that do and if not is there some way I can get the correct beta?

I will post more information tonight or tomorrow depending how long it takes me to put things together.

As suggested I will start a new thread. I will title it Rose Quartz.

Thanks again.

My Best
Jeanny
 
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but my extra point is that even things that aren't supposed to emphasize caustics look more drab and flat without them

It's really sometimes just a few specs of light that make the big difference. If you don't look for it in a picture, you don't notice it but it makes the pic real. It can look plain wrong without it.

It would be nice to have some sim of it in falcon. On the feature list of the Cheetah-Website they are proudly mentioned without a remark like "Cheetah renderer only". I think, that would be necessary and fair to potential customers. But well, advertising ...


But my real gripe with falcon and glass is the black stuff which should not be there. I'm still not sure if it's reflection or refraction (or both; and you get it even with fully white background); in most other renderers it's refraction. But then you have some possibilities to get around it which plain don't work in Cheetah (like a bigger scale). With Cheetah you only have changing the form and the angle to get a good result (or putting on gold rims).

To tell the truth, rendering glass, especially drinking glasses, is a problem in any renderer out there I tested. Some are better, some worse, but in this case Cheetah is the worst (to be fair, in quiet a lot of other aspects it doesn't have to hide from the others). In other apps you can crank up some parameters and pay the price in rendering time, one has even built-in cheats for lower refraction bounces (changeable exit color and refraction blur). Even then lots of pictures with glasses show black rims.

And yes, with a real glass and a camera it's sometimes hell to get a good picture, too; dust, reflections and so on. You always end up with more or less heavy photoshopping. But black stuff in rims is in a photo always a reflection from the surroundings.

I still believe, cranking up the bounces would be the solution, together with fake caustics (and of course creating lights that reflect). But like I said, in other aspects it's a great software.
 
Mis, the first two show more than enough of the black stuff that shouldn't be there, especially not with an absolutely white background (which I think you used in the first) and this geometry.

But the third one could get away easily as a photo. Very nice caustics, too, and good material for the straw. Doesn't even look like falcon.
 
You're right, in the first two renders I used environments with no dark parts, so there shouldn't be black spots in the glass.

The third looks realistic because there are dark parts in the environment and so the dark spots in the glass look believable.

Conclusion: with a good HDRI background you may get away with Falcon glass renders!

For comparison a Cycles render with 50 transmission bounces: no black stuff :rolleyes:

redstraw4.jpg
 
The third looks realistic because there are dark parts in the environment

I know. Also, with such a background, there is something to refract and reflect, which changes the position of the dark spots. And yes, so one can get away with it – but usually I don't want the hdri this visible in such cases.

For comparison a Cycles render with 50 transmission bounces: no black stuff

Ahem, no :). If you watch a bit more closely you see some black stuff in the rims that should not be there. But it's already miles away from the first 2 renders.

I don't know cycles that well, but if you wanted to get rid of it completely you could use more bounces, like 128. Would probably be clear then. If not, you could use a backlight, a trick that should work in every renderer except falcon. The max of 32 bounces in total is just plain too less.
 
I don't know cycles that well, but if you wanted to get rid of it completely you could use more bounces, like 128. Would probably be clear then. If not, you could use a backlight, a trick that should work in every renderer except falcon. The max of 32 bounces in total is just plain too less.

If you run out of reflections, blending with grey would probably mask a lot of problems pretty well.

Way back in the dark ages of computer graphics we had 256 color palettes and we had 1-bit transparency channels. It was _amazing_ how well premultiplying the translucent edges of images with grey worked (versus black or white which is what most programs did by default). It's not even cheating — treating running out of reflections as "ok, we get zero" is no better than picking some other number.
 
Pod, I'm one of them who still knows Monochrome, CGA (3 colors) and EGA (16 Colors). 256 Colors was back then a big move up, but the pictures still looked not that good. Gif still is around, and you can get good quality pics only in cases like logos where you don't have much colors to begin with.

But that with the color blending is true; modo still has an exit color if it runs out of refractions, primary meant for the use with less bounces. Something like this helps. The black stuff is not that offensive anymore if you change the color. But it's preferable to crank up the bounces for a still and / or use some other tricks.

To do it in post is not that easy with a cheetah render. I tried, but the results were not very good; you would need a lot of time for retouching to get good results.

And yes, somewhere every renderer has to stop computing refractions. No question about that. But most have a lot more of bounces till they get zero, and thats a big step to reality. 32 isn't much today. You seldom need more, but when you need it, it makes the big difference. You see it with the blender pic.

By the way, if you look at mis' examples: Falcon's caustics were so much more beautiful than blender's.
 
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