नेय्मलस Blog

Recently one of the studios wanted me to rig, animate and render a train model that they had purchased. The project was supposed to be done on Houdini, but I insisted that It can be done faster in Blender. Any way I did some render test to compare Blender's Internal renderer with Houdini's Mantra and Mantra was way fast, so I tried some compilation tricks to optimize blender as much as possible with surprising results. I was getting almost the same speed as Mantra which is an Enterprise class renderer comparable to Renderman and its like.

But speed is gained at the cost of subtle artifacts.

Here are the comparison of the two renders. One is rendered with slightly optimized build and the other with aggressively optimized build with -fastmath and all that.

My render times were like this: (Mantra 59 seconds)

1 ] With Blender from the Blender foundation: Rendering time 1 minute 31 seconds.

2 ] With optimized compile : Rendering time 1 minute 14 seconds

3 ] With highly optimized build : Rendering time 1 minute 3 seconds

Between one and two there was no difference in quality.

But between two and there, you start seeing the dreaded artifacts.

Here are the images from two and three. Watch the clips closely. Its not that hard and you will instantly catch several artifacts. some glaringly obvious. (Ignore the Jpeg Artifacts as I have compressed it for net, but the artifacts that I am speaking about are not Jpeg or any compression artifact, they are urrrrm very obvious)

Without: Without Errors

Errors: With Errors