it was better before

[Sharlybg]

I open this thread with tears on my heart. since a lot of time i was a bit unhappy of the way the whole CGI industry is currently turning . Overhall render complexity is rising while ( Detailed geometry , scanned mesh and texture, complex shader) REAL REALISM is turning down. Now everyone said there is no 100% physically correct renderer. I think we loose this Beautifull Authentic realism of Older renderer. I'm not a great technician and don't know what turn wrong theses day but with my naked eyes i can feel and see that something is missing.

WHY ? What is missing ? Where is this magic line of code that create this so natural look ?

Image is better than 1000 of words so let start : Theses images are from some renderer where i feel this missing plus :



ARION render : http://www.randomcontrol.com/ http://www.randomcontrol.com/gallery

Maxwell Render : http://www.nextlimit.com/maxwell/gallery/

Indigo render :

OLD Luxrender : :

https://vimeo.com/22238076


Please Look closely there is something missing now. I can't believe it is artist issue. something goes wrong and i can't tell what but i'm not crazy .

[lacilaci]

Of course it is an artist issue, you can literally make maxwell render look like a scanline render from 1998 or something. You can easily find incredibly crappy render from the best unbiased renderer ever and also incredibly realistic render from a decade ago on mental ray running all the biased solutions. What makes modern renderer good is proper color management, ease of use, feature set to allow maximum artist control, stable results and fast!! previews and good scaling on many threads... There is no magical ingredient in a renderer that will make your renders better.
But of course there are renderers that stand out, like fstorm for example, single developer ex-otoy guy made a renderer that's easy to use and has incredible color reproducion that the best of the industry can't match...

[stefdln]

Interesting topic
Though I do not totally agree with you as I think this is mostly user related.
These days you do not have to fully understand rendering, modeling and texturing as in the past.
Things have become really user friendly. As a grandpa I remember beta versions of Brazil RS with all those technical names for each and every shader, it was a pain in the ass figuring out the meaning of it all. You had to make some research, read the docs, understand the way real light work, the way real materials work too, and so on. You had to learn what makes a realistic picture by observing what's happening in the real world. This was a learning process.
Nowadays everything shader for instance is supposed to be physically correct, so why bother ? Tick the right boxes and the software will do everything for you the right way, one can think. The thing being you're totally missing the texturing part in this case. The learning process is gone.
I think you get my point, people have gotten lazy because they can afford to, and still manage to produce acceptable renders in the meantime.
I'm not being nostalgic at all, I love the way everything is now easy to use physically plausible so you don't have to bother with energy conservation for instance.
I've seen some recent renders with Corona that totally blow me away. The science behind rendering has never been so accurate.
Plus i think you have to consider the way things struck you at the very moment you saw them. This is very misleading. Some of the pictures you post here seem average to me.
I still think my first IBL render of a teapot on a plane is mind blowing, but you would certainly consider it worthless

[Sharlybg]

Of course it is an artist issue, you can literally make maxwell render look like a scanline render from 1998 or something. You can easily find incredibly crappy render from the best unbiased renderer ever and also incredibly realistic render from a decade ago on mental ray running all the biased solutions. What makes modern renderer good is proper color management, ease of use, feature set to allow maximum artist control, stable results and fast!! previews and good scaling on many threads... There is no magical ingredient in a renderer that will make your renders better.
But of course there are renderers that stand out, like fstorm for example, single developer ex-otoy guy made a renderer that's easy to use and has incredible color reproducion that the best of the industry can't match...

We are not speaking about the same thing. Yes i know about under performing artist. some will do crappy thing with gold on they hand. but this not what i want to spot here. When you look at diferent engine gallery or artist work you can see how each renderer deal with light and tone mapping. I've tried Indigo and i can tell you that it behave in a really different way than cycles or luxrender (of course cycles and lux don't behave the same i also feel my Lux project to be more natural less cheaty).
I spot that each renderer have a kind of identy that you can feel by watching at diferent artist artwork and some renderer seem to have this natural deep and detailed light propagation even today.

[Sharlybg]

I've seen some recent renders with Corona that totally blow me away. The science behind rendering has never been so accurate.
Plus i think you have to consider the way things struck you at the very moment you saw them. This is very misleading. Some of the pictures you post here seem average to me.
I still think my first IBL render of a teapot on a plane is mind blowing, but you would certainly consider it worthless

Yes iknow those picture aren't perfect i don't want to point here the modelling or the way people textured in the past. what i want to point here is mostly related to the way light interact with surfaces and shader. And it is something you hardly see with all renderer. I remenber my first step with lux and indigo. I'M Totally sure something really change !

I know what i'm seing.

[lacilaci]

Of course it is an artist issue, you can literally make maxwell render look like a scanline render from 1998 or something. You can easily find incredibly crappy render from the best unbiased renderer ever and also incredibly realistic render from a decade ago on mental ray running all the biased solutions. What makes modern renderer good is proper color management, ease of use, feature set to allow maximum artist control, stable results and fast!! previews and good scaling on many threads... There is no magical ingredient in a renderer that will make your renders better.
But of course there are renderers that stand out, like fstorm for example, single developer ex-otoy guy made a renderer that's easy to use and has incredible color reproducion that the best of the industry can't match...

We are not speaking about the same thing. Yes i know about under performing artist. some will do crappy thing with gold on they hand. but this not what i want to spot here. When you look at diferent engine gallery or artist work you can see how each renderer deal with light and tone mapping. I've tried Indigo and i can tell you that it behave in a really different way than cycles or luxrender (of course cycles and lux don't behave the same i also feel my Lux project to be more natural less cheaty).
I spot that each renderer have a kind of identy that you can feel by watching at diferent artist artwork and some renderer seem to have this natural deep and detailed light propagation even today.

Well, of course different renderers handle tonemapping and color management differently. Also the very popular ACES filmic is still broken and I guess it still affects how blender handles renderings. AFAIK only fstorm dev and Unreal engine dev's did a workaround to make it work properly, I don't know maybe octane too as it looks just right most of the time.. Other than that it is pain to get a photographic look straight away.
I think fstorm tonemapping controls are the best, easy and gives amazing look straight from rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJfMPl8geFo

[B.Y.O.B.]

The grass was greener ...
The light was brighter ...
The taste was sweeter ...

[Sharlybg]

The grass was greener ...
The light was brighter ...
The taste was sweeter ...

Nice song ! anyway the title can be a little confusing. I'm speaking in a relative way as you can see i mention Arion render / Maxwell / Indigo and theses one seem to behave in this kind of super accuracy light transport and shading. you can really see they are different in that level but they are not Renderer from the past.

In the contrary some other renderer seem to rely to much on cheating for everything ( sorry but always feel like Cycles cheat somewhere, also Vray but this seem to be on purpose).

In this field Corona seem to have a balanced mix between deep light / accuracy / Speed. But what i spot is this mysterious plus Arion render / Maxwell / Indigo Shared Even bad render seem to have this too natural light look.

Of course i didn't say that i don't like how fast Luxcore is now compared to the past !

[sarmath]

I open this thread with tears on my heart. since a lot of time i was a bit unhappy of the way the whole CGI industry is currently turning . Overhall render complexity is rising while ( Detailed geometry , scanned mesh and texture, complex shader) REAL REALISM is turning down. Now everyone said there is no 100% physically correct renderer. I think we loose this Beautifull Authentic realism of Older renderer. I'm not a great technician and don't know what turn wrong theses day but with my naked eyes i can feel and see that something is missing.

WHY ? What is missing ? Where is this magic line of code that create this so natural look ?

All renderers you chose to show off are spectral and I think this is your special ingredient...this is your magic line of code cheers

[lacilaci]

On every one good spectral render you can find 10 just as good or better from rgb renderer https://corona-renderer.com/gallery

there is no secret ingredient. It's colors and tonemapping, and luxcore could definitely do a bit better here too.

But hey, there will be a spectral build of cycles so maybe we'll see some nice comparisons there. If there will be also some materials and shaders that can take the advantage. But other than some specific effects like dispersion I don't think it's worth it.