PBR w/ Realtime Ray-tracing Questions in X13

[Kbird1]

1 hour ago, kwhitt said:

It's starting to appear as though my RTX5000 card is quite capable after all.

 

My understanding is it is pretty much a 2070Ti with more memory , so should do fine, which is why I thought

1 hour ago, MarkMc said:

cap live samples (you musta been asleep for that one Mick)

Tech Support was wrong originally.

 

3 hours ago, kwhitt said:

I did a test on the RTX5000 with wall set to invisible and it works - see attached!

 

it will work at the expense of not seeing the Wall which may or may not be acceptable , as will making the Glass a General material with 100% transparency

though it doesn't look quite the same either.

 

2 hours ago, kwhitt said:

If Mark will provide the scene file, would you mind trying it out on your RTX3080?

 

I have a Meeting this morning but will have a llok at the thread Plans again later today....

 

1 hour ago, kwhitt said:

More testing... 

 

It's the mirror material that's the problem. 

 

Nice Find - document well for Tech Support please....

 

1 hour ago, MarkMc said:

cap live samples (you musta been asleep for that one Mick).

 

It's the fact that it is OFF by default that fooled me , causing some plans to boost and stay there and not Others , eg the plan you supplied the other day, and I am not sure how the other 25,000 CA Users who don't visit the Forum will work that out? and wonder what the H*** is going on.

 

Mick.

[kwhitt]

55 minutes ago, MarkMc said:

See number 4 above- that is inside a symbol.

Mark - I never thought about the shower tile being one huge symbol.  It may be preventing light from accessing this area.  The mirrors at the wall are also sunken inside a wall cabinet that makes up the frame.  I'll do some more testing without the shower tile symbol and report back.  Thanks, Kevin

[Kbird1]

8 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

Just to note this is a generic response , not subjective to you. Hoping more people find this.

Regarding the quote, I guess therein lie the difference, I don't see these as workarounds at all. The nature of this type of raytrace, which I try to explain in that post, will always have techniques that need be implemented. There is simply no way you can have a scene that will look as intended in both standard and raytrace views, its an impossibility due to the nature of the rendering engine. All of these same theories in realtime raytrace have been around for quite sometime. The Thea render manual for version 1.5 dating back like 7 years I think, goes through all of the reasons that an under-sampled, under or overexposed lighting condition will cause such a problem. I've done support on quite a few scenes now and haven't run into anything that couldn't be fixed with a few tweaks and settings. 
We have a new tool that can garner fantastic results with a skilled technician. This requires a skillset and a level of understanding that far surpass that needed for standard PBR. . I didn't need to play around for very long to work through similar issues because I have a wealth of understanding in such techniques. Speaking from my experience, this is simply the nature of the beast. I'm sure Chief has an overwhelming number of support calls while people try and figure rt out. The greatest takeaway from this, is that our community is learning the skills to sufficiently use such a rendering engine which can carry over in them being able to pick up other such rendering software's as we get closer to the industry standard. Just wait till we get a denoiser and selection based image sampler amongst 100's more complex rendering techniques and features.

 

I guess I am just a bit disappointed after spending $10K on CA Software and the same on Hardware ( at least)  in the last 5-10yrs only to find that someone needs your level of Rendering Expertise to make it look good, ( not that I had any hope of a one click solution) which means there is likely 5 of you here on the Forum with the "Training" to figure it out in a timely, cost effective manner, while the rest of us will spend in ordinate amounts of time trying to make it look good to win a Contract, only to move the camera 6" and have to start again....

 

Mick.

[MarkMc]

7 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

It's the fact that it is OFF by default that fooled me , causing some plans to boost and stay there and not Others , eg the plan you supplied the other day, and I am not sure how the other 25,000 CA Users who don't visit the Forum will work that out? and wonder what the H*** is going on.

Yeah tech is wrong if they say it doesn't matter. Agreed and Scott missed it in his presentation. I asked him why it was off and he said no reason. IMO it should be on by default. Which is what I have done to my template defaults to make life simpler.

NOTE that  if you get a plan from someone with RTRT camera(s), edit camera in project browser to see what settings are for camera and the rendering technique before opening the view.

 

9 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

I never thought about the shower tile being one huge symbol. 

I'm guessing you have built this to work with an outside render. If you want to render in Chief ya gotta do it Chiefs way. my nickel...

[MarkMc]

 

4 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

only to find that someone needs your level of Rendering Expertise to make it look good,

Can always use PBR with RT turned off. IMO it's still a lot easier, and way faster than CPU RT. Hey, Rene was kind enough to do a session with me on Thea (which I keep in the closet) just before PBR landed. So I understand just how good he is. That said I managed to work out RTRT  to my satisfaction and I am not remotely close to his level. For that matter I've tried all of the freebie renders that have been posted in recent years, and did a spin with my Thea back in the day. I find this easier than all of those but then as noted above, I'm not all that good (or patient). Yeah maybe I did invest a little more time in this than those because I was committed to do so.

[Renerabbitt]

On 7/13/2021 at 4:43 AM, kwhitt said:

"the nature of the beast" as there are plenty of real-time rendering engines that deal with refraction correctly

This is taken a bit out of context and I should have been more clear. "The nature of the beast"... of a software that is implementing more than 5 different rendering methods for singular geometry and material/lighting set in a scene. The reason glass doesn't work as you would hope is because glass must still work as intended in a cpu ray-trace as well. We are now trying to get the same results from an unbiased and a biased rendering engine(though I would still argue that Chiefs CPU raytrace is still biased) and then comparing it to a dedicated biased rendering software(of which chief is often at the same price point). This means you can't write it into code the same way a typical physically based rt dedicated rendering software can. Many of those softwares aren't including a true IOR either.
Refraction is a big issue that I imagine will take another year to address. I know that most users probably missed it but if you go into the material properties of a glass material what do you see on the preview geometry? The IOR is WAYYYYY too strong(I happen to know the size of the preview objects and they are small enough not to be refracting 4' off center)and also, the flooring at the sidewall is reflected, meaning we dont have a second opposing bounce that is the nature of refraction. This indicates a very clear problem to me. Most architectural fixtures that have glass in OOTB Chief are double pane. Its an extremely complex bit of code to get IOR, Attenuation, antialiasing, caustics and a slew of other even more complex problems inherent in a glass material. The IOR then was built specific to double pane glass, and also, the ior is simply a singular bounce in one direction only. Try putting a single face with a glass material and put it next to your shower glass. Now put a second pane in and see what happens(the refraction effect is compounded in the direction of the refraction instead of attenuating. (not true IOR)
Side note-textures are super heavy at 2K and unnecessary for the scene. this scene was rendered with these material replacements:
Tagging @MarkMc and @Kbird1

*220505 Deleted Attachments to free up space*

[kwhitt]

1 hour ago, Renerabbitt said:

This is taken a bit out of context and I should have been more clear. "The nature of the beast"... of a software that is implementing more than 5 different rendering methods for singular geometry and material/lighting set in a scene. The reason glass doesn't work as you would hope is because glass must still work as intended in a cpu ray-trace as well. We are now trying to get the same results from an unbiased and a biased rendering engine(though I would still argue that Chiefs CPU raytrace is still biased) and then comparing it to a dedicated biased rendering software(of which chief is often at the same price point). This means you can't write it into code the same way a typical physically based rt dedicated rendering software can. Many of those softwares aren't including a true IOR either.
Refraction is a big issue that I imagine will take another year to address. I know that most users probably missed it but if you go into the material properties of a glass material what do you see on the preview geometry? The IOR is WAYYYYY too strong(I happen to know the size of the preview objects and they are small enough not to be refracting 4' off center)and also, the flooring at the sidewall is reflected, meaning we dont have a second opposing bounce that is the nature of refraction. This indicates a very clear problem to me. Most architectural fixtures that have glass in OOTB Chief are double pane. Its an extremely complex bit of code to get IOR, Attenuation, antialiasing, caustics and a slew of other even more complex problems inherent in a glass material. The IOR then was built specific to double pane glass, and also, the ior is simply a singular bounce in one direction only. Try putting a single face with a glass material and put it next to your shower glass. Now put a second pane in and see what happens(the refraction effect is compounded in the direction of the refraction instead of attenuating. (not true IOR)
Side note-textures are super heavy at 2K and unnecessary for the scene. this scene was rendered with these material replacements:
Tagging @MarkMc and @Kbird1

 

Rene - thanks for the reply.  I am still not sure what I am looking at here.  Does the glass you show in the image above have refraction enabled or is this your general material hack?  Or have you disabled refractions in the PBR DBX?  I still don't feel like I've got an answer to my original question.  Is Chief capable of showing reflection behind refractive glass if I have the right graphics card?  Nathan in tech support told me yesterday that it was possible.  @MarkMc shows it in his sample file.  I don't have the recommended card, so cannot test.  If not possible to do what I want, I doubt I'll spend thousands on another machine when I just bought one in September 2020.  Thanks again for your help with this matter, Kevin. 

 

You are probably right about the textures being too high res.  I come from a background where we would render 4k plus images and the higher res textures are necessary.  In fact, I have an entire library of texture maps some of which go up to 8k.  I agree it is overkill for a less than 2k JPG image out of Chief.  I didn't bother lowering them as my machine can handle it.

 

[Renerabbitt]

31 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

Rene - thanks for the reply.  I am still not sure what I am looking at here

That image was more for the purpose of showing how chief is handling refraction. That was a live image that had refraction toggled halfway through processing and then screen clipped before it could process the refraction toggle. 
Kbird1 answered your original question, the 3080 doesn't change anything in terms of refraction and mirror reflections. 
 

 

31 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

I come from a background where we would render 4k plus images and the higher res textures are necessary.

To note, I didn't down sample your main tile image, I cropped it. Same fidelity with less variation. I often do this on small surface area materials in a low FOV condition where variation is imperceptible. With no caching, baking, or proxies, chief sucks at high res.

[kwhitt]

20 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

That image was more for the purpose of showing how chief is handling refraction. That was a live image that had refraction toggled halfway through processing and then screen clipped before it could process the refraction toggle. 
Kbird1 answered your original question, the 3080 doesn't change anything in terms of refraction and mirror reflections. 
 

 

To note, I didn't down sample your main tile image, I cropped it. Same fidelity with less variation. I often do this on small surface area materials in a low FOV condition where variation is imperceptible. With no caching, baking, or proxies, chief sucks at high res.

Sorry for being dense, but that's a "NO" to my original question and tech support is incorrect?

 

@MarkMc - Mark - in your sample file, you had refractions disabled?

 

Thanks all, Kevin

[MarkMc]

@kwhitt Yes disabling refractions works about the same as changing the material from glass to just transparent.

However the original rendering sample I posted that was inside a shower, with glass door with refraction ON. There is a lot less light going on there and no symbol issues.

 

You're card will work, as Kbird pointed out it will behave similar to a 2070 -a 3000 series card will be 3 to 5 times as fast. (my 3070 is about 5xs as fast as the laptop 2070S which would about match a 2060 S Desktop)

 

Just curious here

1 hour ago, kwhitt said:

I didn't bother lowering them as my machine can handle it.

Have you tried to export image of that rendering? How long is it taking? Do you know which resources are being used if it takes a realistic amount of time. On my desktop I forced close after 20+ minutes .

[kwhitt]

15 minutes ago, MarkMc said:

@kwhitt Yes disabling refractions works about the same as changing the material from glass to just transparent.

However the original rendering sample I posted that was inside a shower, with glass door with refraction ON. There is a lot less light going on there and no symbol issues.

 

You're card will work, as Kbird pointed out it will behave similar to a 2070 -a 3000 series card will be 3 to 5 times as fast. (my 3070 is about 5xs as fast as the laptop 2070S which would about match a 2060 S Desktop)

 

Just curious here

Have you tried to export image of that rendering? How long is it taking? Do you know which resources are being used if it takes a realistic amount of time. On my desktop I forced close after 20+ minutes .

Mark - thanks for the reply.  It sounds like you are saying that Chief is capable of reflections through refractive glass.  I tested your theory about the reflective objects inside a symbol and it didn't seem to make any difference.  I deleted the tile shower symbol and moved the mirrors outside of the wall cabinet framing and the results were the same.

 

It takes about 35 seconds to export CAM04 on my machine.  I've had no problem.  

 

If it's true that Chief can do what I want, it sure would be nice if someone could render my scene on the recommended graphics card.  That said, it looks as though Mick has already done that and got the same results as me...

 

Thanks again for the time, Kevin

[kwhitt]

20 minutes ago, MarkMc said:

@kwhitt Yes disabling refractions works about the same as changing the material from glass to just transparent.

However the original rendering sample I posted that was inside a shower, with glass door with refraction ON. There is a lot less light going on there and no symbol issues.

 

You're card will work, as Kbird pointed out it will behave similar to a 2070 -a 3000 series card will be 3 to 5 times as fast. (my 3070 is about 5xs as fast as the laptop 2070S which would about match a 2060 S Desktop)

 

Just curious here

Have you tried to export image of that rendering? How long is it taking? Do you know which resources are being used if it takes a realistic amount of time. On my desktop I forced close after 20+ minutes .

Mark - do you have the scene you posted earlier?  I'd like to try rendering that on my RTX5000.  If successful, I won't purchase the new machine.  Kevin

[Kbird1]

3 hours ago, MarkMc said:

Yeah tech is wrong if they say it doesn't matter. Agreed and Scott missed it in his presentation. I asked him why it was off and he said no reason. IMO it should be on by default. Which is what I have done to my template defaults to make life simpler.

 

Yep exactly what I have done now too , now I know the Cause...... and also set the Background intensity to 500 in all Cameras.

 

Did I miss you posting your original plan where is works for you ? as I can't make it work without one of the workarounds mentioned here same as Kevin.

 

Or did I miss another Point ?

 

[MarkMc]

9 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

I can't make it work without one of the workarounds mentioned here same as Kevin.

I can't haven't been able to make Kevins work without a workaround. The plan I posted is one sent to me for revision. Has an unfinished bathroom (see image) I just added one extra mirror, capped samples, adjusted background intensity and sun then shot a view. To test what I did ....

@kwhitt Just start with a simple house (or as I did grab something handy this one is not mine to post) add a bathroom. Then a shower at one end, glass wall, glass door. Build roof and foundation, put in a couple of mirrors and a couple of lights. Do the rendering settings and shoot a picture. Go from there adding things until you run into trouble.

[Kbird1]

3 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

The reason glass doesn't work as you would hope is because glass must still work as intended in a cpu ray-trace as well.

 

This has been an ISSUE since we got PBR , 3 years ago? , so why do we still not have dedicated PBR Assets  to Work with if that is the Type of Camera you know you will be working with ?  I am not sure why the CPU Render was not removed in the Windows Version to be honest , there is no longer a need for it . It is also unfortunate that Chief will no longer work with outside Rendering Teams such as D5 who told me Chief won't allow them access to make a Plugin.

 

M.

 

 

[Kbird1]

6 minutes ago, MarkMc said:

Just start with a simple house (or as I did grab something handy this one is not mine to post) add a bathroom. Then a shower at one end, glass wall, glass door. Build roof and foundation, put in a couple of mirrors and a couple of lights. Do the rendering settings and shoot a picture. Go from there adding things until you run into trouble.

 

That's what I did above last night and it didn't work ?  which is why I was wonder what you did or didn't do....

 

https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/31348-pbr-w-realtime-ray-tracing-questions-in-x13/?do=findComment&comment=247137

 

M.

[kwhitt]

2 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

 

That's what I did above last night and it didn't work ?  which is why I was wonder what you did or didn't do....

 

https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/31348-pbr-w-realtime-ray-tracing-questions-in-x13/?do=findComment&comment=247137

 

M.

Yes, I am still trying to figure out if it works or not.  The simple file I uploaded earlier (attached again) seems to work when the mirror is a shiny metal.  The glass is refractive and refraction is ticked on in the PBR DBX.  Mick - would you mind taking a look to confirm?

Reflections Behind Glass.plan

[kwhitt]

6 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

Yes, I am still trying to figure out if it works or not.  The simple file I uploaded earlier (attached again) seems to work when the mirror is a shiny metal.  The glass is refractive and refraction is ticked on in the PBR DBX.  Mick - would you mind taking a look to confirm?

Reflections Behind Glass.plan 3.66 MB · 0 downloads

@Kbird1

@MarkMc

@Renerabbitt

I know that the normal direction on the surface of the symbol in other render engines determines whether or not refraction will work within a volume.  There doesn't seem to be a way in Chief to reverse the normals short of making a symbol out of your glass model and reserving within the symbol DBX.  I thought this might account for when it sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't.  I tried this experiment and it failed too.

 

 

[Kbird1]

2 hours ago, kwhitt said:

seems to work when the mirror is a shiny metal.  The glass is refractive and refraction is ticked on in the PBR DBX.  Mick - would you mind taking a look to confirm?

 

I am not so sure about Shiny metal working ? I placed 2 normal mirror from my library either Side here

 

 

Normal Mirror in your mirror ----  not work Either in your Frame or my Mirrors

 

 

I made your Polyline Glass Wall material have Mirror Properties and look what happens...wasn't expecting that.....

I changed your Mirror back to mirror BTW not Shiny Metal.... but you can hardly see you "Glass Wall" now.

 

 

 

Any chance you have a really old Mirror Material of Chief's?  there is one that doesn't work in PBR at all 

or is you Mirror Material one of your Own too perhaps?

 

 

[Christina_Girerd]

FYI, the cam4 view thru the glass shower door shot doesn't have reflections with a 3090 card either.  This was a PBR exported image, screen size.  Took less than a minute.  Someone made a comment about the mirror material being odd from a top view, but the second image is a floor overview shot, PBR exported basically instantaneous, and all looks good to me.  I did not change any materials or settings.

[kwhitt]

19 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

 

I am not so sure about Shiny metal working ? I placed 2 normal mirror from my library either Side here

 

 

Normal Mirror in your mirror ----  not work Either in your Frame or my Mirrors

 

 

I made your Polyline Glass Wall material have Mirror Properties and look what happens...wasn't expecting that.....

I changed your Mirror back to mirror BTW not Shiny Metal.... but you can hardly see you "Glass Wall" now.

 

 

 

Any chance you have a really old Mirror Material of Chief's?  there is one that doesn't work in PBR at all 

or is you Mirror Material one of your Own too perhaps?

 

 

Thanks Mick.  The mirror material I used was from the library and I altered the settings from mirror to shiny metal.  It was a new material.  Would you mind rendering my scene using the saved camera right out of the box with no changes?  It works for me every time - just tested again...

[kwhitt]

15 minutes ago, Christina_Girerd said:

FYI, the cam4 view thru the glass shower door shot doesn't have reflections with a 3090 card either.  This was a PBR exported image, screen size.  Took less than a minute.  Someone made a comment about the mirror material being odd from a top view, but the second image is a floor overview shot, PBR exported basically instantaneous, and all looks good to me.  I did not change any materials or settings.

Hi Christina - thanks for running the test on the RTX3090.  The second image looks to me like it is the standard render (not PBR) or did I misunderstand something?  Kevin

[MarkMc]

@kwhittI tried stripping down a plan from the one I posted the image of earlier and ran into the same issue you had-no reflections. I used edit area, copy and pasted to a new plan. Both plans use the same materials and same camera/render settings so I don't know what is up with that.

OTOH- @Renerabbitt suggestion to use a transparent material works just fine keeping refraction on for both 04 and 07

Which would do it for me as a solution, ez. I also messed around making one side of the glass wall opening no material on the stripped down plan mentioned earlier (and on this one just for grins)-that works fine on the wall even with tempered glass but it doesn't work on the door.

 

Aside, I found out that the export issue I was having was due to using all 3 monitors. After both you and Christine brought mentioned short export times I did some testing with an overhead.

[kwhitt]

28 minutes ago, MarkMc said:

@kwhittI tried stripping down a plan from the one I posted the image of earlier and ran into the same issue you had-no reflections. I used edit area, copy and pasted to a new plan. Both plans use the same materials and same camera/render settings so I don't know what is up with that.

OTOH- @Renerabbitt suggestion to use a transparent material works just fine keeping refraction on for both 04 and 07

Which would do it for me as a solution, ez. I also messed around making one side of the glass wall opening no material on the stripped down plan mentioned earlier (and on this one just for grins)-that works fine on the wall even with tempered glass but it doesn't work on the door.

 

Aside, I found out that the export issue I was having was due to using all 3 monitors. After both you and Christine brought mentioned short export times I did some testing with an overhead.

Thanks again Mark.  I've decided to render the whole thing without refraction and call it done.  I will most likely not be buying the new machine if it provides no advantage.  I just don't understand how it is working as I would it expect it to in the last scene file I posted while not at all in others.

Reflections Behind Glass.plan

[Christina_Girerd]

1 hour ago, kwhitt said:

Hi Christina - thanks for running the test on the RTX3090.  The second image looks to me like it is the standard render (not PBR) or did I misunderstand something?  Kevin

Oops - you're right.  Got distracted.  Here is a similar view (didn't save the other one) in a PBR export, again no materials or lighting changed.  This took a little longer, maybe over one minute, but I had video playing in another window which might have impacted it.