A few questions

[William]

Hi, I have some questions for indigo renderer if you don't mind.
General questions of how indigo performs, there is a trial version but first it would take a while to be aquainted with the ins and outs of the engine for a fair test to be done.

I am looking for alternative render engine to Vray, probably next year.
Getting tired of it's "static" way of working. You know, "press go and hope it turns out ok" .

Looking at progressive engines with stable and updated exported for Blender.

1. Can you support adjusting gamma for HDR lighting images, for enhancing it's shadow contrast?
2. How much does blendigo keep up with blender updates?
3. If building render nodes, roughly 6 i7 units. Will this properly benefit from adding GPU (adds much cost$$) or do GPU easily run out of their memory and this is not useful in typical indigo scenes?
   
   IE are GPU's worth bothering with a render cluster.
4. Do HDRi lighting perform well and bring nice shadows? Interior and exterior.
5. how would we speak of memory usage, in terms of large image+textures and lots of geo+instances
6. Is there a problem with aliasing and rings around bright spots or other similar filtering issues that are a pain?
7. Can we render depth maps and possibly "material/object id maps"?
8. Is a shadeless material possible, doesn't receive/produce or block light? (for background planes)
9. any users find pains, or do we enjoy working with indigo all the way?

Thanks for any thoughts.

[Juju]

I don't have answers for all your questions, I'm sure some of the "old hands" will, but I have the following to add:

Getting tired of it's "static" way of working. You know, "press go and hope it turns out ok"

I hear you, exactly the reason I moved from another rendering solution.

1. Can you support adjusting gamma for HDR lighting images, for enhancing it's shadow contrast?
2. How much does blendigo keep up with blender updates?
3. If building render nodes, roughly 6 i7 units. Will this properly benefit from adding GPU (adds much cost$$) or do GPU easily run out of their memory and this is not useful in typical indigo scenes?
   
   IE are GPU's worth bothering with a render cluster.
4. Do HDRi lighting perform well and bring nice shadows? Interior and exterior.
5. how would we speak of memory usage, in terms of large image+textures and lots of geo+instances
6. Is there a problem with aliasing and rings around bright spots or other similar filtering issues that are a pain?
7. Can we render depth maps and possibly "material/object id maps"?
8. Is a shadeless material possible, doesn't receive/produce or block light? (for background planes)
9. any users find pains, or do we enjoy working with indigo all the way?

3. GPU only does path tracing for now, some scenes don't resolve well with only path tracing. If you want Bi-directional path tracing or want to combine MLT at all you will only be using CPU for rendering. Also, I found my previous GPU had 1GB memory and it would sometimes be problematic with a fairly uncomplicated scene, I upgraded to a newer GPU with 3GB memory and I have not had any trouble so far, I suppose it depends on how complicated your scenes are.

8. AFAIK yes.

9. I'm a new user, it has been fairly easy to adapt to using Indigo (Skindigo exporter for SketchUp in my case) and use. I am still finding my way along some of the settings and such but all in all good experience so far.

[CTZn]

1. When using HDR lighting the environment is defined as a normal material with an HDRI texturing emission. As a texture, a gamma control is normally exposed for it.

4. Provided that the HDR quality provided meets the requirement, yes. Indigo environment sampling can be qualified as accurate.

[tar_gniK]

7. Material/object id maps yes (in Max at least), not sure about Skindigo or Blendigo.

[Headroom]

This works in Blendigo as well.

[Zom-B]

Getting tired of it's "static" way of working. You know, "press go and hope it turns out ok"

He he, then you are at the right sport here



1) atm Indigo does reset the HDRI gamma to 1 since its the way its "meant to be", but that allowing tweak the gamma needs to be coded by the devs, shouldn't be that big task I think...

2) Blendigo is kept up to date by Nick himself (the main dev) and the code is even available on code.google, so everybody can hack stuff in etc. if wanted.

3) I would go for pure CPU power since GPU rendering isn't very "flexible" with pure PT available only (but great for outdoor shots and non indoor scenes like Studio setups with HDRI)

4) That relates to how dynamic your HDRI is... there are a lot low quality HDRIs around that look good but render bad. In such a case you also can Blend a Sun with a HDRI together (setting at the same spot) for crispy nice shadows.

5) Instances are free like a beer. Also big meshes can be thrown at Indigo without any problems. Only high output resolution together with (SuperSampling) AA combined with Multiple LightLayres (its like Multilight) can raise RAM usage to some level, but here exact examples need to be shown, its still very gentle I think
(Keeping your weightmaps masks etc. in Greyscale also saves quite some RAM since Indigo loads textures as raw pixeldata!)

6) Material ID is available and Depth Pass was developed, but had no official release till now... maybe we need to ask for it again a little louder

7) aliasing Rings are no Issue for LDR PNG output, but are if you use to sharp SuperSampling Filters for 32bit EXR output.

8 ) No "shadeless material" available at the moment, but it was heavily requested, so chances are good that it comes... at some point

9) Since Indigo has quite a lot of frequent Beta releases and a very responsive development team that listen well to its customers most of us are a quite happy bunch

Enjoy your test drive with the Demo

[William]

Thanks guys for the replies and info!