[video] Conference Room Blender Cycles

25 Oct 2021

In the past I tried several things to get feedback from my readers (of this and related blogs). I opened a forum, I tried to provide very detailed information, etc. From now on I will only create short videos to demonstrate that stuff actually works on my machine, some additional information about what you see, and an email address for you to contact me in case you have questions. You find the email address on the imprint page, but here it is (just in case):

admin [at] janwalter [.] org

Video

Click on the image above to go to the video on YouTube.

Description

What you see in the video above (if you click on the screenshot) was recorded on Windows 10, basically opening a scene within Blender (by drag&drop) and making Blender fullscreen. On the upper right you see the Outliner with the display mode Same Types, which in this case are five different cameras. By pressing F12 you can render an image looking through the selected camera. After the first image was rendered (via Cycles), I did select another camera in the Outliner and used a shortcut (Ctrl Numpad 0) to look through the selected camera. I do render an image for all 5 cameras in the scene.

Download conference_room_v2_79.zip and try for yourself:

$ unzip -l conference_room_v2_79.zip 
Archive:  conference_room_v2_79.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
 14109472  2021-10-26 17:38   conference_room_v2_79.blend
---------                     -------
 14109472                     1 file

Rendering Research

I provided a lot of scenes in various scene descriptions, so people can download the scenes and render them directly with a renderer of their choice (in case I did have a license for it, and was able to create a scene description for that particular renderer). First I used Blender to create such a scene (a lot of them came from the Radiance renderer) and I wrote my own little addon (for Blender) in Python to export the scene to various (renderer specific) scene description files.

I will continue to provide Blender scenes in the future (mainly because Blender is open source and my own renderer is able to render some .blend files directly). The other file format I will provide is for Houdini (Indie). Some examples are already online, e.g. a simple Cornell Box, and the Attic scene by Gleb Alexandrov.

In the future I might be able to use USD directly, e.g. Arnold can render those, but for now I will restrict myself to those renderers which can be used from within Houdini (e.g. via a USD Hydra render delegate) or Blender. Some standalone scene descriptions might be provided from time to time, but I’m planning to make my own renderer more and more production ready and therefore I will take scenes e.g. from the Blender Cloud, change them, so they work directly as input for my own renderer, and provide scenes for Houdini and Blender (version 2.79 for now).

rs-pbrt

So, why bother? There is nothing special about a Blender (2.79) scene being rendered by Cycles (Blender’s internal GI renderer). Well, except that this scene can be rendered directly by rs-pbrt from the command line and your are able to switch the camera from the command line as well:

Click on the image above to go to the video on YouTube.

blog

I will write a little blog post describing the details about the video and provide a link once it’s published.