Status update

[Jeremy Hill]

Hello all, just a note to let you know what’s up lately, since we’ve just been quietly working in our caves. 🙂

I have been working on a new PBR-style material that will be a 1-click type of affair, where you select either a texture from a typical PBR texture set, or a .zip file containing one, and you get a nice material from it:

To support this I am also creating a new color-mixing node, which allows blending an arbitrary number of colors/textures, using photoshop-style blending:

Albert has also been working on another new material type, somewhat in the style of Disney’s principled BRDF, Arnold Standard Surface, and other such “uber” shaders:

This will be more of an all-purpose material than the core Bella types, where rather than starting with a base conductor/dielectric/etc and adding layers and such, you add different parts of the material by changing their weight.

Oscar continues to work on the core for our GPU solver, with some quite interesting original research, not specifically related to GPU, happening along the way, which will bring Bella some capabilities we’ve not seen in any other renderer. I’ll chat with him and see about putting together some info to show about this.

So that’s what’s going on, and we’ll be trying to get a new build with these new materials out within a couple of weeks, after we’ve brought them to a decently-mature stage.

[Philip]

Very exiting news! Thanks JD!

[yossi]

looks so promising, can’t wait to try!! just please make it user-friendly 😉

[Jeremy Hill]

We will do our best. 🙂

I have been chatting with Oscar, and though we do not want to give away too many details, and show things before it is 100% sure they will work, he will write something here in awhile.

[Oscar Cano]

Thanks for your words, we really hope you like this new stuff. 🙂

Without giving too many clues to competition, and promising specific things before we have proved them, I will try to explain a bit about the new solver… This solver is a new technology, I’ve been working half of my life in rendering technology and this solver is by far the most sophisticated, and of which I am most proud. Saying is a GPU solver is to simplify a lot. Is not a mere translation from CPU to GPU, something quite usual today. I have design from zero, absolutely from zero, a new engine, very accurate and very optimized in speed, speed the main priority, with some technologies unknown previously (as far as we know), that will be disclosed, as said before, when we are 100% sure we have something that works well.

In my opinion, the nicest feature (and hardest to achieve) is that we solve in GPU all kind of complex lighthing (like complex pool caustics, sss, whatever), the GPU solver is as powerful in these ways as its CPU counterpart. Is not just-another-gpu-pathtracer. And this new design is done to simultaneously work at same time in both CPU and GPU. Just working in CPU mode it is by far more efficient than any other solver we have so far.

So, we have our main branch of CPU solvers, daily improving them, with plans at short term to make a big improvements in Apollo engine. At some moment, we will expect to have our new next hybrid CPU/GPU engine technology (we call it Jupiter here) ready to play, still too early to know if we will wait until it handles the full set of Bella features or we progressive release it as we add more features to it. But as always, we won’t release nothing until we are super sure that is stable and does what we affirm.

Thank you a lot to everyone who follow and read us, we really appreciate all your comments and we would love to see that one day you use Bella in your everyday basis work. 🙂

[yossi]

sounds very promising! can I wonder if Jupiter will support the new 3070? #NeedForSpeed_in_my_renders

[Philip]

Sounds really great Oscar! This will take Bella to the next level! 🙂

 

[Oscar Cano]

Hi Yossi, I guess by 3070 you refer to RTX, and yes all algorithms are being designed to fully use RT hardware to accelerate the raytracing computations.

Other good thing I forgot to mention is that we are currently targeting vulkan, which is cross platform, to ensure the widest support for realtime hardware. It means that bella GPU is not only to run in NVIDIA, but the new AMDs too, even future intel raytracing gpu will run with vulkan.

Thank you Philip 🙂

[Philip]

Good to know that it will work on my Mac also (Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB) 🙂

 

[Jeremy Hill]

I still have a mining rig with 6 vega frontier edition 16gb 😆

[Author]

Posts