Dade wrote: ↑Thu Sep 26, 2019 9:39 pm
lacilaci wrote: ↑Thu Sep 26, 2019 3:50 pm
While you could find light conditions where some "darkening" would be apparent (especially if all underwater surface is in shadow and water surface is reflecing sky for example)...
In very bright daylight with sunlight blasting on the water and under the water you might find water being extremely bright due to all the caustics
24f9298b7e95253a4e420267887248dc.jpg
I have the feeling it is indirect light, check the photo you posted, even the underwater pool wall, not reached by direct sun light, is very bright.
I don't know, it definitely isn't so bad as previously. I kinda still wish I could get more light there so I'm experimenting...
By the way, your minradius of 0.04 is still pretty big imho...
this is 0.01
but for closeup on the pool I'm gonna still need lower, like 0.005.
The problem with that is, what you see on the sphere, it gets some low frequency noise... Again, rounded surfaces have hard time gathering photons, while bottom of the pool/flat surfaces sharpens nicely, anything rounded is super hard to render.
Performance seems good, however in a case of "juice in glass" scene where you have glass with volume within another clear glass, my rendering went to 0 samples/sec and I watched individual pixels appearing (this was in a scene with only hdri and objects so I guess you're not killing photons that bounce into infinity?!)....
Another amateur observation:
When I focus on sds only, it doesn't make sense to me starting with such big initial lookup. It only helps with very noisy caustics (non sds) but I guess we will have lighttracing for those anyways, right?
For example starting with 0.01 and minradius of 0.005 I'm getting pretty nice super sharp caustics in big 42m pool within 100 samples (and no visible dark edges too) - of course reflected caustics and normal non sds is a bunch of low frequency noise
here's a quick render ~5min. 131passes
If I use high initial lookup I have very visible dark lines where the steps in the pool are(that kinda don't go fully away), but with these settings you can't see any edges and overall it is pretty bright in the pool!
I think it could be pretty awesome if we could have 50%cpu runnig VM sds, 50%cpu running lighttracing and gpu doing pathtracing
thick volumes within glass
it's pinacollada so it should be pretty white (maybe it's again the issue that it is round and photons don't catch on?)
I think this would be solved with hybrid glass for the glass itself though.
hmm... further testing...
even starting at 0.005 and minradius 0.005 is pretty awesome... Great performance and I would say much better as big initial radiuses
If I clamp at 2 000 000 and render with only 0.005 radius even OIDN can denoise that!
this is only 3min rendering at full hd res + oidn (yes it's still messy but it's 3 minutes!!)
I'm also getting 4X the samples/sec with this low radiuses!
...which means I can shoot 10x more photons and still get a great performance
initial 0.005 minradius 0.005 and 750 000 photons are fantastic and fast for my pool it seems
with these settings this is what 3min rendering looks like!!
this is amazing, even shooting like 5 000 000 photons is almost instant and has very small impact on performance when using low radiuses
this is 0.005 both min and initial radius and 5M photons in 10 samples! (that sphere looks still terrible though)
There is also no darkening (edges or overall) bellow water, we just need a lot of photons and small radiuses
look at this, it's blurry and low res but I'm so happy this is doable now... (except the gray pinacollada though)
2minutes..
OK, so in the end I'm rendering with 0.001 for radiuses and 5M photons and still get amazing performance and results
I think your defaults are way too slow and problematic with those edges(btw pool was also more brighter with smaller radiuses!).
maybe reflected caustics could work too if you could somehow filter out these fireflies