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You should also try setting up area lights marked as _Portal_ on windows that need to light scenes. It apparently helps the guiding of sampling from environment lights into the meaningful render environment. In practice, I find it sometimes makes a huge difference, but other times makes no difference. Apparently speeds up render times too, but I can't be certain.
One trick I came up with is to use the Fast GI Approximation setting under the Light Paths settings in Render Settings tab. Normally this option looks pretty awful, but by setting the true GI bounces to 2, setting the AO distance to 1m, rendering out an HDRi of my scene, and mixing the rendered HDRi with my sky so that the rendered HDRi is only visible to diffuse rays, I get a result that looks almost identical to the fully real GI while rendering about 10% faster. Its not physically accurate, but most of the time, its close enough.
What's the window glass modeled like? 2 solid pieces of glass (silly realism), 1 solid piece of glass (usually overkill realism for no reason), or 1 thin geometry piece of glass (best practice for architectural renders)? For the latter, you can't use a glass shader at all anymore, but have to setup something like layerweight/facing -> power 5 -> add 0.005 into factor that mixes transparency and reflection. Facing setup resembles fresnel close enough for glass, with no worries of backfacing normals or infinite refraction and you get "fresnel" transparent shadows for free. If you *need* refraction for refraction roughness (camera rays), you need to use Geometry/Incoming as the refraction shader normal to eliminate infinite thickness refraction. If you want "fresnel shadows", use 1-(the full facing stuff above) as the transparent shader color; glass cast a darker shadow if light hits from glancing angles, although using full transparency will most likely be "good enough". For other applications of the glass trick to let light through, sometimes you need to add other types of rays into it as well. I.e. a solid piece of glass close to a picture in a picture frame might require diffuse rays to be added to the shadow ray. Sometimes need to experiment with what rays affect the outcome. I usually have a material called __BLACK__ that I use for fake holes material; just a Material Output node with no shader in it. Controlling IOR level within a normal shader setup, all the way to 0, can be useful for "shadow gaps"; i.e. floor boards with visible openings between them modeled as a flat plane instead of actual boards. Doing office building floors, sometimes huge ones, I can't be bothered handling actual geometry. Won't the billboard trick, using only two planes, be negatively affected in that shot when flying above them? Would a third billboard facing up make things look better or worse? An additional trick I use for interiors, is setup walls, floors, and ceilings, with a shader node group at the end that makes the shader transparent if viewed from the backface. If not, these elements just block the view too often when I'm navigating the camera. These elements for me tends to be single faces, I only need the inside of an office building outer wall as I don't do exteriors.
Extra info for the tricks. - You can also disable contribution of individual lights to volume by going to object -> visibility -> ray visibility -> disabling volume scatter. Keep in mind that if volume bounces are higher than 0 in max bounce settings then the volume will still receive bounce lighting from that light, but at least it'll not be anywhere near as strong and you won't get a hot spot where you can tell exactly where th light is. - An even easier way to make a solid black material is simply having an empty material, just a sole material output with nothing connected to it. It's functionally identical but faster to set up and I imagine it might be a bit more performant.
For fog volumetrics. Switch to eevee. 'Holdout' all collections. Render a volumetric cube to png with alpha. Composite back into final rendered scene. Great for car headlights/flashlight beams. Faster than cycles volumetric rendering.
GENIUNS! We need more optimization these days. Glad someone took the interst to find new techniques to solve an old problem: fix the slowness of 3D; optimize. Sadly there's not a lot for us EEVEE users tho. It's only fast (to cyclers) if you got a good GPU for your scenes already lol.
Very valuable advices here, thanks for sharing! I use the mist pass for cheap fog a lot, but there is some limitations, for example it wont work through transparent materials, or stuff like billboard smoke. The fix : render those transparent stuff separately with a render layer! a little bit of a pain, but the time saved can be massive. another way for fast volumetric is to render the scene WITHOUT volumetric with cycles, and ONLY the fog with EEVEE in a linked scene, then combine those two in post. EEVEE renders fog super fast, with wonderful godrays, this is really worth the hassle. (small) Problem with this method, you wont be able to use a fisheye cam (only works with Cycles). but you still can do the distortion in post, after combining the 2 layers :)
Thanks. Incidentally, according to RUclips, you've posted more comments on my videos than anyone else. I have no idea if that's true or what period it covers.
Great analysis, thank you! I have a quick question: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
I would love to see some compositor basics - how to access and use. I loved Shake as a nodal compositor 20 years ago and Blender looks similar, but the documentation is not clear.
If you want a really black hole that does not show any color, shadows or reflections, do not bother with adjusting color, roughness or specularity. Just disconnect any shader from the Material Output.
I every time fake my interior scene. I use different lighting in every different angle, if i would like to render any room part which is very dark i add extra light to reveal its details. Because in real life photographs also add extra lights in darker areas or they block high exposure lighting by adding curtains on the windows
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Flash sale now on. Get it while it's hot.
Save 20% on the Exterior Masterclass with the code LAUNCH
decoded.gumroad.com/l/exteriormasterclass
You can save 40% on the Essential Topology guide with the code FLASH
decoded.gumroad.com/l/ESSENTIALTOPO
And you can save 40% on the Interior Masterclass with the code FLASH
decoded.gumroad.com/l/interiormasterclass
The billboard facing trick is such a simple and elegant solution I've been needing for years now. Thank you for sharing these tips!
You should also try setting up area lights marked as _Portal_ on windows that need to light scenes. It apparently helps the guiding of sampling from environment lights into the meaningful render environment.
In practice, I find it sometimes makes a huge difference, but other times makes no difference. Apparently speeds up render times too, but I can't be certain.
Didn't expect you here
One trick I came up with is to use the Fast GI Approximation setting under the Light Paths settings in Render Settings tab. Normally this option looks pretty awful, but by setting the true GI bounces to 2, setting the AO distance to 1m, rendering out an HDRi of my scene, and mixing the rendered HDRi with my sky so that the rendered HDRi is only visible to diffuse rays, I get a result that looks almost identical to the fully real GI while rendering about 10% faster. Its not physically accurate, but most of the time, its close enough.
Not only were the tips super useful, you made me understand why blender behaves the way it behaves. Thank you so much!
What's the window glass modeled like? 2 solid pieces of glass (silly realism), 1 solid piece of glass (usually overkill realism for no reason), or 1 thin geometry piece of glass (best practice for architectural renders)? For the latter, you can't use a glass shader at all anymore, but have to setup something like layerweight/facing -> power 5 -> add 0.005 into factor that mixes transparency and reflection. Facing setup resembles fresnel close enough for glass, with no worries of backfacing normals or infinite refraction and you get "fresnel" transparent shadows for free. If you *need* refraction for refraction roughness (camera rays), you need to use Geometry/Incoming as the refraction shader normal to eliminate infinite thickness refraction. If you want "fresnel shadows", use 1-(the full facing stuff above) as the transparent shader color; glass cast a darker shadow if light hits from glancing angles, although using full transparency will most likely be "good enough".
For other applications of the glass trick to let light through, sometimes you need to add other types of rays into it as well. I.e. a solid piece of glass close to a picture in a picture frame might require diffuse rays to be added to the shadow ray. Sometimes need to experiment with what rays affect the outcome.
I usually have a material called __BLACK__ that I use for fake holes material; just a Material Output node with no shader in it. Controlling IOR level within a normal shader setup, all the way to 0, can be useful for "shadow gaps"; i.e. floor boards with visible openings between them modeled as a flat plane instead of actual boards. Doing office building floors, sometimes huge ones, I can't be bothered handling actual geometry.
Won't the billboard trick, using only two planes, be negatively affected in that shot when flying above them? Would a third billboard facing up make things look better or worse?
An additional trick I use for interiors, is setup walls, floors, and ceilings, with a shader node group at the end that makes the shader transparent if viewed from the backface. If not, these elements just block the view too often when I'm navigating the camera. These elements for me tends to be single faces, I only need the inside of an office building outer wall as I don't do exteriors.
Extra info for the tricks.
- You can also disable contribution of individual lights to volume by going to object -> visibility -> ray visibility -> disabling volume scatter. Keep in mind that if volume bounces are higher than 0 in max bounce settings then the volume will still receive bounce lighting from that light, but at least it'll not be anywhere near as strong and you won't get a hot spot where you can tell exactly where th light is.
- An even easier way to make a solid black material is simply having an empty material, just a sole material output with nothing connected to it. It's functionally identical but faster to set up and I imagine it might be a bit more performant.
For fog volumetrics. Switch to eevee. 'Holdout' all collections. Render a volumetric cube to png with alpha. Composite back into final rendered scene. Great for car headlights/flashlight beams.
Faster than cycles volumetric rendering.
GENIUNS! We need more optimization these days. Glad someone took the interst to find new techniques to solve an old problem: fix the slowness of 3D; optimize. Sadly there's not a lot for us EEVEE users tho. It's only fast (to cyclers) if you got a good GPU for your scenes already lol.
Very valuable advices here, thanks for sharing!
I use the mist pass for cheap fog a lot, but there is some limitations, for example it wont work through transparent materials, or stuff like billboard smoke. The fix : render those transparent stuff separately with a render layer! a little bit of a pain, but the time saved can be massive.
another way for fast volumetric is to render the scene WITHOUT volumetric with cycles, and ONLY the fog with EEVEE in a linked scene, then combine those two in post. EEVEE renders fog super fast, with wonderful godrays, this is really worth the hassle. (small) Problem with this method, you wont be able to use a fisheye cam (only works with Cycles). but you still can do the distortion in post, after combining the 2 layers :)
That lightray trick for the window is a great idea!
Thanks. Incidentally, according to RUclips, you've posted more comments on my videos than anyone else. I have no idea if that's true or what period it covers.
Thanks for the glass tips I always forget about the reflection and light ray hack
That window trick is a huge help. Can you go in depth about the difference between the portal and your trick.
Nice, I'll definitely be using that mist pass trick.
Very nice hacks
good stuff. thanks.
You also can deactivate volumetrics on the light itself in the object settings.
Great analysis, thank you! I have a quick question: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
I would love to see some compositor basics - how to access and use. I loved Shake as a nodal compositor 20 years ago and Blender looks similar, but the documentation is not clear.
WAs per now which course you recommend of yours to master Blender?
Useful stuff.
If you want a really black hole that does not show any color, shadows or reflections, do not bother with adjusting color, roughness or specularity. Just disconnect any shader from the Material Output.
Emission into volume 🤯
Can the billboard trees “track to” the camera so they are always facing the camera?
Yes. It can be done easily with constraints.
Are you using nodes to duplicate the trees?
It's just a hair particle system.
I every time fake my interior scene. I use different lighting in every different angle, if i would like to render any room part which is very dark i add extra light to reveal its details. Because in real life photographs also add extra lights in darker areas or they block high exposure lighting by adding curtains on the windows
Are all your "weird" hacks still valid with v4.3?
Add timeline please.
the trees just look like a flat jpg image LOL. doesnt have any depth at all, also doesnt help that its cut off suddenly.