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After Effects and METAL – revised messaging.
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[James Culbertson] “I’ve been using AE for 20 years and at this point I rarely pay attention to speed enhancements. Everything renders so fast I don’t really care. I do have a MacCylinder though.”
I don’t really care about final render speed, either. Computer time is cheap.
I do care quite a bit about interactive render speed. Artist time is valuable, and every… little… delay… while… you’re… iterating… a… design… is… maddening… and… kills… creativity.
Performance is a creative feature.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “[James Culbertson] “I’ve been using AE for 20 years and at this point I rarely pay attention to speed enhancements. Everything renders so fast I don’t really care. I do have a MacCylinder though.”
I don’t really care about final render speed, either. Computer time is cheap.
I do care quite a bit about interactive render speed. Artist time is valuable, and every… little… delay… while… you’re… iterating… a… design… is… maddening… and… kills… creativity.
Performance is a creative feature.”
Exactly! Along that line, I often wonder what happened to Octane for AE.
I didn’t really notice it before, but the more I use Octane or Arnold in C4D, the less patience I have for look development in AE. Even Fusion’s viewport performance seems sluggish by comparison.
I’m really hoping that Adobe and Blackmagic have something special brewing in the lab.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “I didn’t really notice it before, but the more I use Octane or Arnold in C4D, the less patience I have for look development in AE. Even Fusion’s viewport performance seems sluggish by comparison.”
Shawn, would you mind to elaborating on look dev in C4D/Octane/Arnold? I’d love to hear about how you’re using it, and what benefits/limitations you see.
Thanks!
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “I do care quite a bit about interactive render speed. Artist time is valuable, and every… little… delay… while… you’re… iterating… a… design… is… maddening… and… kills… creativity.”
I was talking about both; though primarily in 2D space. If I did more 3D work I’d probably feel differently.
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[Oliver Peters] “so Metal may or may not be that big of a factor.”
The demo of both Illustrator and AE on WWDC was *very* impressive in how much faster and smoother it seemed though.
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[Walter Soyka] “[Shawn Miller] “I didn’t really notice it before, but the more I use Octane or Arnold in C4D, the less patience I have for look development in AE. Even Fusion’s viewport performance seems sluggish by comparison.”
Shawn, would you mind to elaborating on look dev in C4D/Octane/Arnold? I’d love to hear about how you’re using it, and what benefits/limitations you see.”
Hey Walter, I started using Octane earlier this year after working through a particularly challenging scene in C4D. I really loved the look I was getting out of the Physical Render with global illumination, but I didn’t love discovering that I had GI flickering after test renders. I also really hated going through the proccess of, change parameter, render, change parameter, render, repeat until satisfied. So, I downloaded Octane, spent a few days learning the lighting and shading system, and then re-textured and re-lit the scene. Not only did I cut test renders down by 75% (only rendering to see motion blur), I discovered that it was much faster and easier to see how changes to my lights and shaders affected the look of the piece I was working on in (near) real time. Best of all, no GI flicker. If Octane can’t resolve ray bounces with the number of samples you give it, it displays errors as noise. So, your biggest decisions when setting up Octane are; how much time (or samples) you want to give it, and how much noise you can live with.
Fast forward a few months, I was happily working away in Octane when I read the announcement that Arnold had been released for C4D. I had heard great things about it, so I downloaded the trial, learned the basics of the lighting and shader system and gave it a try. I was hooked in a day. Octane is a fantatic renderer that runs like a dream on relatively inexpensive nVidia GPUs, but there’s just something about the renders I get out of Arnold, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Arnold’s interactive viewport is a little slower than Octane’s, but (IMO) Arnold’s shader, camera and lighting systems seem more intuitive and a bit more mature. Arnold is also a little more stable on my system.
My biggest surprise working with these renderers, is speed of iteration. With both applications, I can work side by side with visual reference, while refining the look of the scene as I go. I don’t think about how much time the final render is going to cost me, becuase I can see how long it takes to render things like transparency or subsurface scattering as I’m working. Again, I don’t have to change something, wait six minutes, change something wait three minutes – I just work, and I get a feel for how expensive my changes are as I go (did I mention that GI flicker is a thing of the past). I should also mention that motion blur doesn’t add very much time to the final render with either application… I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.
Of course, both renderes also have their downsides. Octane is fantastic, but it’s not as stable or as intuitive as the Physical Renderer. It also has some issues rendering caustics, and the viewport stalls once in a while. When using Arnold, I find that the displacement node isn’t nearly as prectictable as it is in C4Ds material system. I also dislike that fresnel isn’t supported on the reflective channel. There are other issues with Octane and Arnold, but I haven’t found any show stoppers yet.
To sum things up, the strengths of both renderes for me are; speed of iteration due to viewport previews, more accurate lighting (than PR), faster rendering of motion blur and no GI flicker. The only real drawback IMO is the less intuitive material/shader systems compared to C4D.
As a quick example, here’s something I was working on a few days ago. I went from no shaders, to look A, to look B in about an hour – I rendered a few test frames so I could evaluate motion blur. Otherwise, I just concentrated on refining the shaders and the lighting. I’m obviously not finished, but I think this would have taken me more like two hours if I had to render every 10 or fiften minutes, and then tweak GI parameters to avoid flickering.
Lastly, I really like both of these renderers. But I find that I gravitate toward Octane for speed, and Arnold for beauty. I still like C4D’s built in render engines, but I’ve been using them less and less.
Shawn
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