News about GPU rendering with LuxRender, YafaRay, iRay and Maya
In the past few days a lot of interesting news and demos about GPU rendering appear o twitter and user forums. It`s quite clear that after the announcement of Octane Render and Arion, we will start to see even more releases related with GPU render. I will start with the announcement of a GPU render dedicated for Maya, called FurryBall and it`s based on Path Tracing algorithms just like other solutions, which results in quite good rendering and GI quality. The video below shows a quick demo of the software running in Autodesk Maya and manipulating a 3d car model, with a good level of detail. It works in a similar way than V-Ray RT inside 3ds Max.
The second demo I want to show involves LuxRender and the production of animation with the software. If you may have already tried to create animations with LuxRender, you may know how time consuming it might be. For each frame of the animation we have to spend a great amount of time to get a noise free image, or use a lot of computers in a render farm. With the new experiments on LuxRender and GPU Render, we can expect to create animations using complex materials like glass in a very short time. Here is an example of simulation using the Bullet Physics to create the interactions between objects and LuxRender:
Now, let`s take a look on a demo of iRay from Mental Images. A friend asked me a few days ago if he could use one of those GPU based renders as their main software to create photo realistic images. Well, the next video shows the result of an image rendering during 15 minutes with iRay. Of course, the video has only 15 minutes in length, because it`s in timelapse format. But, we can see the result after all that time and the quality of the image.
And to finish the assorted group of news and demos on GPU rendering, you might be asking yourself when we will see YafaRay to get a GPU render modele? Well, they just posted a page with ideas for Google Summer of Code 2010, and one of them is the use of GPU to speed up the rendering. If you want to take a look and help with YafaRay GSoC 2010 ideas, visit this link. One of the projects is the integration between YafaRay and Blender 2.50. I really hope that they get at least one project accepted this year.
I am sure the market in ready for competition..GPU rendering seems to rule in the coming years
FurryBall is NOT based on any kind of raytracing. It is rastarizator. Like very advanced photorealistic game engine. And that’s why it is way faster than any other renderer till this day 🙂 ( you just cannont compare speed of gpu rastarization to raytracing – even if it is runned on gpu. Simple reason rastarization is for what is gpu created :)).