though, its not many tanrics favourite topics, but, it'll be of real helpful, when u tantrics land up in big studios.
When I first
downloaded Gelato 1.2 Beta 3 I already knew that nVidia would do
everything to increase the already strong capabilities of Gelato 1.1
R3. As soon as I proceed to install Gelato in my workstation, I noticed
some new words of things being installed that catched my attention. In
the end of the installation, you have the option to install Python. The
next step was going to Gelato folder and see the new features of
Gelato. I headed straight to the docs folder and opened the Release
Notes. After reading them carefully, one thing was sure: PRMan, you're
in trouble...
Among
the new features, now you have Caustics and Photon Mapping, Subsurface
Scattering, and a lot of improvements in Ray Tracing, Ambient Occlusion
and Indirect Illumination. The new SSS support is great. My past
attempts of (fake) SSS with Gelato were done using a lot of tweak and
experimentation in the shader code, with results hard to achieve and
difficult to predict. Now, Gelato can compute SSS using a two-pass
approach: the initial pass and the beauty pass. The subsurface ( )
function in GSL uses three parameters to control the material
properties of SSS: scattering, absorption and eta.
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The
GSL language has also been greatlly improved, featuring new optional
arguments for occlusion( ) and indirect ( ) functions, enhanced ray
message passing, among others.
The new version of Mango delivers
more enhancements, but at the cost of one thing: Unfortunatelly, now to
use Mango you need Maya 6.0, Maya 6.1, or Maya 6.5. Perhaps this Mango
handicap will make the plug-in be of no use to a lot of people.
It's
good to see that using Mango you are able to control SSS and Indirect
Illumination, with the caustics control being more accurate.
After reading the docs, it was time to see the examples provided with Gelato.
The reading was nice, let's see the action. Two of the examples
automatically catch my attention: caustics and subsurf.
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First,
I run the classic examples, such as the vasefield. First thing to
notice: the new iv window. The new iv window has nothing to do with the
previous versions. iv now features four components: The Title Bar, that
lists the name of the image and the time the image was created; The
Menu Bar with the menu options File, Edit, View, Tools and Help; The
Image Pane, where the active image is displayed; The Information Bar
that gives metadata concerning the image and access to the error log.
It was needed all the space in this article to give you a in-depth look
at iv, so I redirect you to the iv User's Guide. Second thing to
notice: Gelato 1.2 is faster than the previous version. You will see a
comparison in the end of the review.
After
running all the "old" examples, it was time to test Gelato caustics and
SSS with the examples caustics and subsurf. I have to say I was amazed
at how fast the examples were computed. It's my impression, or SSS
renders faster in Gelato than in PRMan? Benchmarks are needed, and they
will be provided by this Academy soon.
The caustics and SSS quality
is great. Gelato now is capable to deliver Gollum look-like characters,
and I think it will be a matter of time untill we see it.
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Gelato is growing up, and I am sure that at Emeryville more than one
person is seeing the development of Gelato with some concern.
Nvidia Digital Film Group is developing a great tool, and at each new
release, it becomes more robust, fiable and production ready.
Although
the new release of Gelato is great (to me, in some aspects it can beat
PRMan), we all know that Pixar will not sleep under PRMan 12 shadow. A
PRMan 12.5 release has arrived, and now it's time to see how Pixar will
handle with Gelato competition. The next months will be decisive to see
the clash of the two titans. Will only one survive, will both co-exist,
only the time can tell. But one thing is sure: It will be a passionate
fight.
Final
conclusions: The new Gelato version is a rendering masterpiece. It
surpass the previous versions in all the ways. With all the new
enhancements and changes I am sure that the movie industry will adopt
Gelato. The renderer delivers all that you can expect from a modern
renderer, with the advantage of being hardware accelerated.
Go to
Gelato website and give it a try. You can download Gelato and see for
yourself. After that, feel free to come to our forum and post your
reactions and experiences with it.
In
order to compare the speed between Gelato 1.1 R3 and Gelato 1.2 Beta 3,
we have used some of the scene files provided with Gelato Evaluation
Notes, that you can download at Gelato website.
File |
Gelato 1.1 R3 |
Gelato 1.2 Beta 3 |
killerooparty-1920.bat |
52.0 seconds |
43.2 seconds |
Killeroo-mb.bat |
20.3 seconds |
17.9 seconds |
trooperoo-1920.bat |
15 minutes, 20 seconds |
14 minutes, 12 seconds |
hairymonster.bat |
11 minutes, 45 seconds |
10 minutes, 30 seconds |
DOF.bat |
34 minutes, 22 seconds |
32 minutes, 10 seconds |
ambocc.bat |
3 minutes, 10 seconds |
2 minutes, 52 seconds |
The render times given were achieved on a workstation with the following specifications:
Workstation :
2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 3200+
3 Gb RAM
nVIDIA Quadro FX 3000
|
Software :
Gelato 1.2 Beta 3
Windows XP Professional SP2
OpenGL driver version 71.84 |
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Related Links :
nVidia Digital Film Group
Get Gelato
PixelBox Academy Forum " Gelato 1.2 Beta 3 " thread
16-01-2005, 04:03 PM
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