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Arnold - are we there yet?


esnoox

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Hi guys,

 

I'm working with Octane since V2 and all in all I'm satisfied with it. I love the look, the simplicity of the render settings and the, with one excpeption, great network rendering capabilities.

 

BUT:

 

We all know how Otoy LOVES to brag, tease and promise... and delivers sooo slow or not at all. This, combined with a pretty wonky stability when it comes to the final render of a 3 month project got me thinking... again:

 

Whats the deal with Arnold? The CPU version was all always the engine where you could just keep throwing stuff at it and it would chew through it. But since we have invested in a bunch GPUs (thoguth wit have 2 threadrippers), GPU is the way to go.

 

So my question is: is it reasonable to make the switch? I Just downlaoded the latest demo since I read it features the new core and the GPU side should benefit a lot from it.

 

So I fired it up, simple scene (plane and a forrester tree) and noticed it uses just one GPU. Alright, headed to the settings, it SHOULD use all of them (settings said 0 in the specific field) but since you could activate the GPUs manually I just tried it:  a certain way to crash the program. Everytime.

 

It is kinda demotivating when you manage to reproduce a bug after 5 minutes of using a software, so I stopped further exploring.

 

So my questions are:

 

Is Arnold GPU a valid alternative to Octane NOW?

Would it be easy to have both engines coexist? Is the node workflow similar?

Does it make sense to start a project with both engines and see what fits better?

How about Performance and stability compared to the latest Octane?

Can you use your other workstatiopns as easy as with Octane?

 

I Would love to hear some thoughts. 🙂

 

Cheers!

 

 

 

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5 minutes ago, Mike A said:

I can't answer your Arnold questions - minimal exerience there.  but maybe you should consider Redshift as an additional option? I've plenty of experience with that if you have any questions!

Well, Redshift is always a silent voice in the back of my head , BUT 2 things keep me from trying it:

 

The tinkering with render settings and the overall look. All the stuff I see online from other artists look great in stylized motion graphics, especially when it comes to particles (another weak point of octane, though its getting better), but for ME the realistic look is missing... or looks with arnold, octane and corona more convincing.

 

But maybe I'm wrong and it changed lately? 🙂

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I think it's absolutely fair comment that Arnold / Octane / Corona have delivered more beautiful images out of the box than RS. A key reason is the RS developers have had a very strong focus on speed. A lot of the material defaults - glass being a good example - were set up to deliver a 'good enough image at the fastest possible speed' as opposed to the other renderers where the defaults are more focused on quality. Can you deliver 'Arnold quality' images from Redshift? Well, that's a personal judgement of course, and one you need to make in the light of your clients and their requirements, but you can certainly deliver images that are very, very good.

 

On the positive side:
1. Quite a few versions ago RS / Maxon revamped the render settings to have a 'basic' and 'advanced' mode so they are easier to get into for new users.

2. YESTERDAY RS introduced Redshift 3.5 with a new 'Standard Material' - which is 'insipred' by the Arnold Standard Surface and has some significant improvements over the now legacy 'RS Material' in terms of material design, energy conservation, rough surfaces, thin film and SSS.

3. Random walk SSS is expected to be added in the next few months.

4. Volume improvments and other work is also well underway.

 

You can check out recent features and future plans on the official Redshift Trello page at:

https://trello.com/b/QASr74yB/redshift

 

Do i think RS is the ultimate renderer for every requirement? No : )

But I've found it capable and reliable for all my work, delivering an image quality that my clients are quite happy with. It might be worth you checking it out!

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Thats the problem with Octane. If youre happy with its render speed, visual style, and how quickly you can work up materials and lighting, then anything else is going to be a bit of a letdown. Arnold is far more stable and has some more complete and production ready features, but the work done with it is dominated by those using cpu-based farms.

 

Redshift gpu in my experience simply isn't faster to render than Octane. It is better at doing quick cheats like simple fog vs octanes mega slow volume mediums, and faint transparent objects struggle less in RS than Octane, but Redshift completely falls apart on any system with more than 3-4 gpus.

 

12 gpus in octane is 12 times faster.

12 gpus in redshift... a) it doesnt support 12 gpus, b) of the 8 gpus it does support, it will only be 4 times faster

 

So its fine on a workstation, but rendering anything serious with it gets quite annoying because you end up needing multiple weak nodes instead of having a small number of powerful machines.

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We used Arnold at my last job in Maya, C4D and was playing around in Houdini.   The shit was rock solid on our farm, running deadline.   Because we were on Macs, we couldn't test the GPU capabilities.   I know they did lag behind Redshift and Octane for GPU features supported but it may have changed over the past year.   I just haven't kept up with it since we were stuck with specific builds at the job site and I wasn't allowed to bring in betas.   I know the latest version is supposed to finally support all (or close to it) features in the Node Editor (C4D) but again, I can't verify the GPU side of things.

 

you could download the watermarked demo from Arnold's website.

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We switched from RS to Arnold last year because of image quality of our product visualisations with a lot of fabric materials. Last year we still had to use CPU because of alpha and AOV issues. It took about 4 times longer to render Arnold CPU in comparisson to RS GPU. But the Client (and ourselfes) was much more happy with the result. This year the GPU issues in Arnold seem to be fixed so we will go for GPU rendering. Will let you know how it went. 

 

But: I changed C4D autosave to every 10 minutes. Because Arnold IPR crashes C4D so often. Did not have those problems in RS.

 

But2: I LOVE Arnold Toon / Countour shader (See my profile title image).

 

And I have only good experience with the people over at answers.arnoldrenderer.com

 

Laters,

Kws

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I've been using Arnold for a few years. A few things to note:

 

1. Arnold is fairly new to the GPU party. When it was first released, it was CPU only. RedShift and Octane have had a lot more time for development, so Arnold is going to be slightly behind. With that being said, the GPU feature is there, and can be used. I have used it (I have a single RTX A5000) and I haven't had any issues with it.

 

2. Before you use the GPU(s), you first have to pre-populate the GPU cache. Did you do that?

 

3. I don't have any experience with Octane, so I cannot comment on it, but the stability of Arnold has been pretty good. Occasionally I will have a crash, usually related to the IPR, but AutoDesk has been making regular updates, and those bugs get fixed.

 

I would recommend that you take some time to convert a copy of a project over to Arnold and see how it works for you. That's what I had to do when I stopped using VRay.

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I have noticed that in interior scene with low light Arnold gpu is very good and fast, better and faster than octane and vray5. 

However, even on Gpu it looks like arnold uses some cpu calculations on my system... like 40% 50% load 

I wonder if you guys experienced the same thing  ?

 

i have an rtx 3080 and a 7700k cpu 32 gig ram

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6 hours ago, pier said:

I have noticed that in interior scene with low light Arnold gpu is very good and fast, better and faster than octane and vray5. 

However, even on Gpu it looks like arnold uses some cpu calculations on my system... like 40% 50% load 

I wonder if you guys experienced the same thing  ?

 

i have an rtx 3080 and a 7700k cpu 32 gig ram

I ran a test to see what mine would do. Initially (during the "preparing" pre-render calculations), the CPU usage was up high around 80-90%. This is to be expected, as Arnold has to load the scene file on the GPU. Once the GPU started rendering, the CPU usage went down to 1.5% and stayed there.

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