Gelato?

[Arnold Gallardo]

I have been testing the free Gelato here and it has a promise. Maybe we can have a forum for it Jeff? Altho nvidia has enough resources online but still I dont see it being catered to arch-viz.

[vizfx]

Hi

This is quite a good idea to have a category for rendering plugins which are harnessing the computing power of the video card increasing the rendering times.

Real time 3D technology (like the latest game engines) offer quite an impressive show regarding rendering possibilities. Take a look at Unreal3 (http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml) or Crytek (http://www.crytek.com) and is real time not minutes per frame…. so… pretty fast results

Best regards.

Mihai

[Arnold Gallardo]

Thanks for the links! If only the new render engines would take advantage of the built in subroutines of the GPU's we can all accelerate our renders! I mean some GPU does raycasting and stuff and now with 'Cg' it can process SSS and other stff. I think most people overlook this aspect of 3D. Most renderings are indirect illumination as well as direct illumination and a GPU would help accelerate these process.

[eksg]

hi there!

 

im always interested on knowing the technical side of 3d,but dont have the right stuff to start with.you may think of me as a "dumb" dumb in terms of technical stuff.im still a newbie in 3d so please spare me if i would be starting to ask a lot of it from this point.

 

lets start with this "GPU".what is it and how can it speeds up my rendering?coz now, im strugling to have my rendering in the most "presentable way" in fastest way possible.thanks in advance.!!!

[Arnold Gallardo]

Ok GPU stands for 'graphics processing unit' which is the video card equivalent of a CPU only that is is made for processing video information as well as computing vectors,positions and geometry transformation. All of this is done at a much fatser rate than a CPU can (they were made to do this anyhow unlike a CPU which is a do it all kind of engine..) Also the GPUs have a lot more transistors than a CPU these days with higher clock rates hence they're faster than most CPU's:

 

http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_home.html

 

Simple computations like raycasting and occlusion computations are done on the fly. If these things can be handed off to the GPU by the CPU things would render much faster. Now the GPU's can also handle material properties as well not just geometry transformation and light computations. Anybody who uses maya already know that the 'hardwar rendering mode' of render is quite fast. it is sad that not many render engines today take advantage of this. Cg is there for all to access with limits of course.

 

You know the FPU (floating point unit) on most GPU's exceed the CPU they run on hence it is much faster if only we can access it. BTW Gelato is a mixed hardware/software renderer. Things it cannot handle in hardware is passed to the software for the CPU to handle.

[eksg]

uh,ok.....nice.hehehe.thanks for that.

 

im using an nvidia fx video card...so that would be a great help.ill get back to you as soon as i downloaded a free version of gelato.ciao.

[vizfx]

An interesting think is that RTSquare GPU rendering plugin from http://www.gputech.com has from now a free version and new allies (ATI&AMD). Until now their results aren`t so impressive as quality and speed but many thinks are going to change. There are even looking for a 3D artist to test their rendering plugin.

So Gelato isn`t anymore the only solution with a free plugin in this field but until now it has the best show to offer.

Mihai

[vizfx]

Hi

I think soon we`ll see some important changes in the GPU rendering field since the acquisition of MentalRay (Mental Images) by Nvidia and Truespace (Caligari) by Microsoft and their new collaboration with 3DVia from Dassault. Another thing not to forget is that now we have great possibilities to expand our hardware with medium cost options like 8800 GT video cards.

Best regards

Mihai