Another MOSAIC progress report

Hey everybody,

Since I have several test renders I thought it would be a good idea to blog another progress report :)
I've been hard at work building the mapping utilities and related improvements over the last few weeks. At this moment I have the zdepth and deep shadow mapping utilities done and have the occlusion rigging utility almost done. Basically all you have to do to use them is just select the light or object and click on the utility desired, set a few settings in a dialog and the scenes and passes are automatically made. Since the passes are built as Blender scenes, theres full manual control of every pass if you need it. I've also been experimenting with the zdepth SSS shader and intend on integrating it into the default shaders. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to have full built-in support for both raytraced and mapped techniques such as:

• occlusion and IBL occlusion (using a dupli hemisphere rig)
• soft shadow lights (including sun ortho lights, and point light cube maps)
• support for both standard and deep shadows depending on renderer
• fresnel reflection and refraction (using both cube and mirror maps)
• caustics (both real and depth mapped)
• Sub surface scattering (currently using zdepth but looking into raytraced)
• support for all Blender's mapping channels

I've also structured the RIB ouput a little different, instead of putting each pass in a separate frame (as is customary), I've put each pass in a separate RIB. This means every mapping technique can automatically use animation whether its a light map an environment map or occlusion map :) I've found myself VERY impressed with these older mapping techniques over raytracing and have become convinced that for animation or large projects (either in resolution or detail) mapping can do almost anything raytracing can but faster (if you're not looking for absolute realism and instead something more artistic that is).

Ok... enough with the report, here's some simple test renders:

This is a test of the very simple SSS shader I'm messing with, In particular I was trying to see how well it will work for lots of detailed grass or leaves as well as heavy displacements (rendered in Pixie):

(I would click on this one to look at it closer, it looks a lot better up close!)

Here's a very poor quality Youtube video showing a simple 30 frame animation with very heavy displacements using mapped ambient occlusion and one shadow mapped spot. When dealing with extreme displacements shadow mapping really shines over raytracing as far as speed goes. This was rendered in 38 mins as apposed to 6 hours using raytracing!



The quality is so bad you can't see the smooth occlusion but on my next release I plan on showing a high quality video with all mapping techniques in one animation ;)

I've also been playing around with Lucille some more :) Heres a quick render showing the previous scene using image based lighting instead of just occlusion:


You can download this here: http://www.dreamscapearts.com/Public/lucille_ibl_killeroo.blend

This is another test to see how much data Blender, MOSAIC and Lucille can handle. This image uses high poly displaced geometry and a lot of polygon tube grass. To be more precise then this scene has 1,987,512 faces! It was exported from MOSAIC in 20 seconds and rendered in Lucille in 8 hours:



I'm not offering this one for download because its 320 megs :(
Thats it for me, hopefully the mapping utilities will be done in a week or two.

Thanks for reading,
>WHiTeRaBBiT<