dmin said Dec 14, 2011
Looking for realtime engines I found Renderlights. The engine looks quite good and the features are really interesting, but I would like to ask some questions about the engine itself:
Q. The demos looks good, but I can clearly see that geometry is really low poly: is Renderlights able to manage huge amount of polygons ( like 10-15 millions ) without any problems? what about performance hit?
A. Thanks mate, the idea of the demos is to be creative at the same time not to overload the system with too heavy model. This is typical of Virtual reality and game industry, to optimize models for better performance.
However, we have been working together with Tekla structures and the amount of polygons that are handle can be as high as you have pointed out, I have myself tested models of over 8 million polygons. Of course I have to point out that there is no engines out there capable of realtime radiosity, the calculations needed to generate this in real time are benefited by smart modeling and optimizations. Another thing in favor of RENDERLights is our offline rendering, allowing us to create very smooth animations even if the realtime frame rate drops too much.
Q. The exe exporting option is a very nice feature: looking at the demos the size in MB is quite small...does it increase if there is more geometry/textures on the models?
A. The size vary depending of the geometry of course, but the biggest issue is always the textures, size of the exe will be strongly determined by the quality of your texture maps.
Q. Again about the exe exporting, is possible to setup a "walk" inside a stage, like a first person view, in order to let the customer see what he will see if he'll walk inside the apartment?
A. Absolutely you can generate endless amount of walkthroughs, you can program 10 ready motion cameras accessible trough a keyboard shortcut, and also use the defined shortcuts and arrow keys to cycle between all of your animations, forward and rewind are also possible as well as pause and resume the animated path.
Q. There is the possibility to change the sky? I mean, is possible to setup a sky system in a different way? maybe something animated or something that will look real, not static...for example in Unity there is a dome with some meshes ( or textures ) that emulate the clouds and move on the surface of the dome...or, in Lumion and Twinmotion, there are HD textures that emulates the sky and the movement of the clouds...I hope there is the possibility to have something like that
A. We are working on a fully developed environment system, we hope to achieve as real as possible the effects of real sky. In the other hand high quality LDR or HDR creates an instant realism that you don't get from the systems you mentioned. You will always recognize when is computer generated, making multiple presentations to look quite the same. RENDERLights support 360 degree videos, therefore a time lapse with animated clouds is easy to setup, providing that you have the ready video. Is a good idea I will setup one ready to be included in the next release.
Q. Is possible to model a terrain inside Renderlights?
A. No RENDERLights is intended for professional usage, terrain tools are nice gimmicks but they don't accurately represent architectural projects, they are more like Simcity kind of game, unlike systems that utilized hight level maps or dem information. We leave the terrain creation for the selected cad program, whether is Archicad, Autocad, Max or any other professional cad software, in which you will for sure have the needed accuracy.
Q. I notice that, between the Sketchup edition and the standalone edition, there is a huge difference about the price...since I'm a Softimage user I'll need to buy the standalone edition, but is way too expansive, compared to other realtime engines around...there are any plans to release a "Renderlights for Softimage" edition?
A. We have plans to support all mayor platforms,and we already support a great amount of formats that are included with RENDERLights Professional. We are launching a Christmas campaign and this will be the best time for you to get a good discount, just let me know and I will arrange you a good offer.
Q. I'm having lots of problems ( before the engine crashes recently ) importing entire scenes...for example, I have an Archinterior DVD and I tried to export the entire scene in .FBX/.DAE directly into Renderlights...result: I waited 2 hour, nothing, not able to import the scene, it freeze after a bit and I have to use task manager to shut it down. Is there a proper and efficient way to import those kind of models ( usually about 2-3 milions polys ) inside Renderlights?
A. OK important to understand materials and compatibility. Make sure you have standard materials, mental ray or Vray wont work on RENDERLights, neither will work on tools that are not created by Autodesk. In global illumination settings you can disable indirect lighting, use constant ambient this will let you import you model rather fast.
Q. Are there any discount/special prices for indie users? my main goal is to provide different kinds of visualization using both 360° pictures, HD videos and realtime navigation to send to the customer.
A. Well im sure we can come out with a good deal for you.
About the 360° pictures I'm done, but about HD videos and realtime navigation right now I'm using Lumion for HD videos and Unity/Cryengine 3 for realtime walkthrough...Lumion looks ok and does a great job for HD videos in a reasonable amount of time, but especially setup the realtime stage using Unity/Cryengine 3 is a very time consuming activity, and there are tons of stuff that I'm not using,
A. Very good tools all of them I use them myself for long time, but I got the same problems than you, that is why I decided to create RENDERLights.
so Renderlights could be the answer to save time, since I just need to let the client walk into the apartment ( for example ) and let him change the time of the day, so he could study the day and night lighting inside the apartment...and some interactive elements ( like doors opening is possible )...thats it, no other fancy stuff or absurd features
A. I beleive I can help you to minimize your stress, I use RL all the time, not because I made it but because it really works.
Q. I recently updated the ATI drivers ( ATI HD 4870x2, 1GB ) and now, every time I run the Renderlights demo, I have a red screen and basically a crash of the application, and I can't open or create a new window...any toughts about that?
A.Hmm I used to have some red screen some years ago, you can send me the log file that is created every time RL opens, it will report the errors. Is located under my documents/renderlights the extention is .log also if you have lost the windows you can delete the pref file from the same folder, that will reset RL to defaults.
Looking forward to receive and answer from you
Best regards and greetings from Italy
Thanks mate I appreciate all of your questions.
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