Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

General News and accouncements regarding the Indigo render engine
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Zom-B
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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by Zom-B » Tue Dec 31, 2019 10:02 pm

Hey Neo0. as always some extra information's are needed...

Does this issue also occur on a very simple scene (cube in sky environment)?
if not, then there is a very good chance your RAM filled up, since denosing eats up a lot of it!
Also try disabling double Buffer to save some RAM too
ErichBoehm wrote:
Tue Dec 31, 2019 8:13 am
Seems like Indigo isn't targeting Mac users? Doesn't seem like a good move as almost the entire creative industry (at least here in the United States) heavily relies on Mac products. I know this is (semi) free, and I think it's fantastic that this is an option to this day, but I just with this thing was a little more mac friendly.
This is more of an insult then anything else, just as Oscar explained Indigo was one of the first GPU Render Engines supported on Apple Hardware.
Also complaining that your stone age 2013 iMac has issues without any providing usable info like your scene info or RAM configuration is classic Neo0. style...
I hope the US creative industry isn't still on so old hardware like you. The 3D industry also is mostly on PC, since you can build a multi GPU machine with state of the art hardware and upgrade as you wish, something apple just recently introduced but was missing for many years...

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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by wob » Mon Jan 13, 2020 11:28 pm

hi, strange behavior of denoiser:

i have 2 computers:

1. cpu intel celeron g3900 + nvidia gtx1060 6gb
2. cpu intel icore 7-9760 + nvidia rtx2060 6gb

denoiser works fine on machine 2 (gpu utilisation ~100%, cpu utulisation ~20%), speed of rendering is great (around x5 time longer than rendering duration without denoiser). But on machine 1: gpu utilisation - ~10-15%, cpu utilisation - 100%, speed of rendering is very very slow (around x100 longer than in no denoise mode).

is indigo using special Core i7 operators or libraries for denoising not available on Celeron g3900? which CPU should i buy for machine 2 to switch on denoiser? or denoiser uses any RTX2060 special libraries for denoising not available on GTX1060?

thanks.

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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by ErichBoehm » Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:01 pm

Hey Zom-B,

I hope al is well. I am a grown man and I don't do the keyboard warrior thing, but my imac has 8gb of RAM, which I think would be enough for the fairly simple work I do. The issue occurs in all kinds of scenes. No error message is given. It simply either freezes up or crashes when I tried to experiment with GPU rendering/bucket. I am not an expert, but with a GPU that has half a gig of memory, you would think that would be enough for most average scenes. A 660M is no slouch I would think.

I don't want you to take this the wrong way. Indigo is really great tool for simple scenes (actually using it to mockup some ideas for a client at the moment) and this is where it shines in my view. It's just that for serious professional (commercial work) work there are some areas where this tool is lacking. Think of the major differences between a professional Red camera and a consumer DSLR. What are some of the major differences that come to mind? Very open ended question, but one of the major ones is efficiency. A Hollywood camera will include zillions of physical controls in order to help the operator do their job in the most efficient way. When I compare Indigo to Photoshop, one of my most heavily used tools, it's that efficiency where Indigo falls short.

For example, Indigo lacks an "undo" button and many of the windows don't have a reset button. I know these things seem like nitpicks, but if I am working on an $1200 project for a client, and I accidentally bump the camera, I will want to be able to undo that mistake. Iteration is lacking, which is another critical component of commercial work. It would be really nice if you could Preview different versions of your scene with different colors. Something like this would be phenomenal (albeit obviously simplified.) One such way of doing this would be to allow the user to create tabs where you can create copies of the scene and let you adjust colors.
https://colorway.foundry.com/

Assigning materials could be vastly more efficient with a palette of thumbnails and a "drag and drop" workflow.

The texture editor is really not at the level of a commercial tool I would say either. Look at Maxwell or other big commercial renderers. Vert powerful texturing features that deliver a great blend of power and ease of use. Some sort of "click and drag" for manipulating texture positioning would be great. Changing the texture projection method will occasionally cause crashes for me as well. Sure, you have texture mapping tools in whatever 3D package you use and it is good practice to to everything there, but you will always have times where you change your mind or miss things.

I think you would be surprised. More people are working with a "stone age" set up for work than you think. I would love an Imac pro, but not everyone can afford it. It is the price many of us pay for pursuing the career and hobby we love :)

The creative industry runs on Apple products, and not every company (especially smaller ones) have the money to afford the newest Mac Pros. I will try to send along more information about the scene next time something crashes. I don't want this to come off as negative. I see so much potential here, with the great render quality. I really think Indigo can be class-leading with a more well designed UI and better stability. This is all I am saying. I want to stop here as I feel like I am rambling, so here is some more information about my system.
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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by fused » Thu Jan 16, 2020 4:01 am

Think about it, the system reserves a fair bit of the GPU RAM, so do other applications running on your system. 512 MB of ram is not all that much, especially not these days.

For reference on the performance you could get from that GPU, have a look at the benchmark results. On the last page of the single GPU results, you will find a few GTX(!) 660s, and scoring above(!) them a MX130 (a mobile gpu from a few years back and much newer than the 660M).

The 660M really wouldn't do much...



As far as your other points are concerned: yes, Indigo has lots of room for improvements in these areas. I took note on some of your suggestions and your feeback is very welcome.

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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by wob » Thu Jan 16, 2020 4:27 am

ErichBoehm wrote:
Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:01 pm
Hey Zom-B,

The creative industry runs on Apple products, and not every company (especially smaller ones) have the money to afford the newest Mac Pros.
advice. sell your imac 2013. buy for this money pc like Asus Z270 motherboard (~50 euro), 2 NVIDIA P106-100 6GB Mining Edition cards (50-80 euro each piece), 32 gb ddr4 ram (~100 euro), intel core 3-5-7 cpu for socet 1151 (~100 euro) and ssd (~50 euro). you will have x10-x20 more powerful pc than you have now. indigo is fastest gpu render i ever see (x2/x3 faster than redshift, not to mention maxwell "big render") but you need a bit of real (not office-styled) hardware to run it.

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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by ErichBoehm » Thu Jan 16, 2020 7:46 am

fused wrote:
Thu Jan 16, 2020 4:01 am
Think about it, the system reserves a fair bit of the GPU RAM, so do other applications running on your system. 512 MB of ram is not all that much, especially not these days.

For reference on the performance you could get from that GPU, have a look at the benchmark results. On the last page of the single GPU results, you will find a few GTX(!) 660s, and scoring above(!) them a MX130 (a mobile gpu from a few years back and much newer than the 660M).

The 660M really wouldn't do much...



As far as your other points are concerned: yes, Indigo has lots of room for improvements in these areas. I took note on some of your suggestions and your feedback is very welcome.
I can't imagine it's much. Windows is know for being a system resource hog, but I never got that impression with MacOS. Even if it is, when you combine the CPU and GPU, you shouldn't be getting 0 samples/second. Here are some more ideas that I think would help in professional situations. What about being able to export a PDF with the rendered version, wireframe, and other render passes in grid form for client review?

What about the ability to add noise to textures through the editor or load photoshop brushes (ex scratches) and adjust how they are blended with the image through an intuitive visual system? There are already thousands of photoshop brushes out there after all. How about the ability to load PSDS for environment maps? Integration with widely used creative tools would make it much more useful for those who do this for a living.

How about the ability to adjust HDR maps with a curve so you don't have to lose time going back into an image editing package to make changes?

What about an integrated animation editor? Something simple, where you click to create a key frame and then create another key frame and then Indigo does the rest?

Why not expand the Open GL preview and let users select objects or let people assign materials by face or object? That way, if people forgot to assign a new material to an object, they don't have to go back and spend extra time.

How about the ability to save and load camera settings, or better yet an autosave feature so if there is a power outage, you don't lose all your work?

How about social media sharing options? I know this seems like a gimmick, but we live in a social media age, and platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc are powerful tools for promotion.

Color picker is a little dated too (imagine being able to use pantone colors, which are industry standard.) Having a guide for analogous, complementary colors would be great. Take a look at these
https://usabilitypost.com/images/0906/colorotate.jpg
https://image1-srjcooldude.netdna-ssl.c ... -tools.png

Speaking of colors, what about being able to create gradients instead of just solid colors for material properties? What about a color picker tool that let you sample color values? Say you are designing a product for a brand that is all about nature. You could samples green hues from the HDR, and be done with it in a seconds.

How about lens presets for Hollywood's favorite lenses or even classic film lenses? Classic film simulation or even light leaks?

I know this is a lot, but I hope it gives you an idea of how much exciting stuff Indigo could add that would make it the talk of the town :)

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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by ErichBoehm » Fri Jan 17, 2020 10:39 am

As a follow up, I have encountered a bug where the "assign material" tool doesn't work anymore. The render will restart, but when I select the material, it hasn't been changed. Indigo version 4.2.25.
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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by Originalplan® » Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:36 pm

Hi Erich,

Hope all is well.
Thought I take the time to reply to most of your questions as a fellow Mac user as in the last 14 years,
and also as a creative professional that actually worked in the Industry as a creative director, graphic designer and 3d generalist. So we can put most of the things on a more objective level here. Let's address it one by one.
by ErichBoehm » Tue Dec 31, 2019 8:13 am

Bucket Rendering, and denoising don't work on a 2013 imac with the latest version of MacOS installed. Niether does OpenCL rendering. Gives me zero samples per second, and crashes when I try to disable it. Seems like Indigo isn't targeting Mac users?
* Tested it for you Bucket Rendering and denoising works flawlessly on my 2013 MacPro with the latest macOS installed.
OpenCL works faster than ever with single and dual GPU also.

** Tested it on my 2012 MacBook Pro also for you. Bucket Rendering and denoising works flawlessly on CPU.
However GPU rendering does not work for me either on that machine. It has an Intel HD graphics 1536 MB integrated GPU.I wouldn't expect it to do much...it's not powerful enough. But for prototyping CPU works reasonably fast for a dual core.

So as for your iMac 2013 it's an all in one, with a not much more powerful GPU than in my laptop. Just a bigger screen.
It won't work sorry.

- - - - -
Seems like Indigo isn't targeting Mac users?
Quite the contrary! Indigo Renderer is at the moment the ONLY full featured unbiased renderer on macOS. With multi scalable GPU support commercially available. So much so that it is the fastest GPU renderer on macOS. ( And tbh maybe the fastest on CPU also )


Doesn't seem like a good move as almost the entire creative industry (at least here in the United States) heavily relies on Mac products.
Let me share my experience here with some facts from the last 14 years. The creative industry uses Mac products because of three things.

1 - Stability for Adobe Apps
2 - Time Machine
3 - Air Drop
4 - Convinient AF

Ofc more minuscule things also, but this are the features that are not available on windows. And it makes the pipeline and workflow of a mid range or bigger Studio much more effective. But that's it. Let me tell you that all of the Studios I worked in all had Mac's as the main computer for design and graphic or retouch related work. BUT in almost all Studios there was at least 2 custom built PC's with high end cards programmed as slaves to do the render job. If you seriously take a client that wants a 3D project done in reasonable time.


- - - -
I don't want you to take this the wrong way. Indigo is really great tool for simple scenes (actually using it to mockup some ideas for a client at the moment) and this is where it shines in my view. It's just that for serious professional (commercial work) work there are some areas where this tool is lacking. Think of the major differences between a professional Red camera and a consumer DSLR. What are some of the major differences that come to mind?
We definitely not taking it the wrong way. The major differences that come to mind is that a RED dragon is around 20K USD and an entry level DSLR is 1K. That translates directly to your setup, we giving you the lens of Indigo but you lack the body of the camera to use all of it's features. You won't get 8K raw video on a 1K DSLR.
When I compare Indigo to Photoshop, one of my most heavily used tools, it's that efficiency where Indigo falls short.
The statement answers your point it self but let me add my opinion on it. They are both very different applications both for different purposes comparing them even in terms of efficiency falls short. PS was designed for layers and manipulation of images, cuts, coloring, editing etc.. without an undo button the whole application would became illogic and unusable.
Look at Maxwell or other big commercial renderers. Vert powerful texturing features that deliver a great blend of power and ease of use.
I been a Maxwell user for years before I discovered and switched to Indigo, I'm not sure what you refer too being great in that. No pun intended it was much worse than Indigo's. I would not take that as a benchmark of anything. Other renderers yeah Arnold and Houdini handle textures very neat imo.

What about being able to export a PDF with the rendered version, wireframe, and other render passes in grid form for client review?
PDF is mostly used as a print format not sure it would make sense having that in a renderer. Like you said you have PS or Ai and you simply save it out from there. If you don't add anything to your render that indicates that it is need to be a PDF than you might as well send the JPG,TIFF,PNG format that Indigo already supports.


How about the ability to save and load camera settings, or better yet an autosave feature so if there is a power outage, you don't lose all your work?
You can already save/load all your camera settings in the 3D app you use. Indigo saves automatically in user set periods, please give a read to the user manual.
How about social media sharing options? I know this seems like a gimmick, but we live in a social media age, and platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc are powerful tools for promotion.
We let Maxwell steal that feature from us. : )
Color picker is a little dated too
You mean the material color meter? Think it's fairly good has all the numbers a designer would need to add exact color.
Speaking of colors, what about being able to create gradients instead of just solid colors for material properties?
You can create gradients it's 1 line of code in a shader. Please read the manual how to do it.
What about a color picker tool that let you sample color values?
You mean like the one comes built in with macOS?
How about lens presets for Hollywood's favorite lenses or even classic film lenses? Classic film simulation or even light leaks?
There is an application called Cinema4D. It has everything built in as a standard every classic lens there was and will be.
Even VR. Indigo supports VR btw.
I know this is a lot, but I hope it gives you an idea of how much exciting stuff Indigo could add that would make it the talk of the town :)
Nah it's cool, constructive feedback is always good. We have a fairly good imagination about exciting stuff to add.
Talk of the town is one of our goals for 2020 in a big right way. : ) yippiyayo
The render will restart, but when I select the material, it hasn't been changed. Indigo version 4.2.25.
This is the forum for Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Erich. Assign material works fine tested it for you also.
You select a material that you want to replace an other material with ( aka new material ) and than hit the assign icon and simply click on the object, or part of the object in your scene that you want to update. And it changes the old material to the new one. Please take some time and read thru the product manual.

You should try it Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 is fire.

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Re: Indigo Renderer 4.4.5 Beta

Post by ErichBoehm » Fri Jan 24, 2020 9:07 am

Hey OriginalPlan,

Just a few thoughts (I don't have time to reply to everything as I am busy with a client at the moment.)

I don't see why bucket rendering and denoising shouldn't work on older computer. I mean, I can't expect it to work as quickly as Apple's latest and greatest flagship products, but it should still be compatible on some level. The iMac is very popular in the creative industry. We are in a visual line of work, and a bigger screen makes a huge difference. Many laptops these days are also blazingly fast and can power through 4k video editing, for instance, with ease. I mean, why are we defending a piece of software crashing? I can try the latest version of Indigo out. Would really be nice to see some form of auto updater. Having to delete the old version of Indigo (along with the Sketchup plugin) and reinstall everything takes time and it can be a bit of a hassle (time is also money as they say.)

I am not sure whether this idea that Indigo is the only unbiased rendering tool comes from. You have many others (afterall, hollywood is in need of such tools.) . You have Maxwell, Fluidray, Geurilla, etc.


Mac products are also designed with a focus on user experience, which allows people on tight deadlines to get things done because they can focus on the creative process and not on fighting with the tech.

The major point that I was trying to make with the Red camera is that professional tools are always more efficient, and having to restart your render because you accidentally nudged the camera settings (and there is no reset button) is a mistake that could cost thousands in lost profits for a company.

Client briefs and proposals are commonly sent in PDF format, as are portfolios.

Indigo's color picker is certainly adequate and there is nothing overtly wrong with it, but being "fairly good" doesn't help you stand out. The color picker a is a central part of of most designer's workflow and it could be improved I think. For the sake of comparison, here is Indigo compared to other apps
https://i.ibb.co/DKq5zcJ/Screen-Shot-20 ... -58-PM.png
https://i.ibb.co/gS2m6H6/75f9174b4a3f77 ... fc2359.jpg

Or check this out
http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel

It's for photoshop, but something along this line would make choosing colors much more intuitive and efficient.

Lastly, I looked into the gradient, and I could find any direct reference to creating a gradient. This would be 10 times faster if done through the UI and would ensure that everyone had access to it, whether or not they have a background in coding, which many of us don't have.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

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