[HN Gopher] Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated by Model...
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Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated by Modeling a Film
Camera in Blender [video]
Author : CharlesW
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-07-02 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| corysama wrote:
| It's... beautiful.
| zokier wrote:
| Could have gotten proper glass dispersion effects, that now got
| dropped, if he had used luxcore instead of cycles. But that might
| be considered cheating :)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| the best thing about this is the presentation format
|
| one thing thats great about this content world is that people
| learn how to get to the point very quickly and efficiently!
|
| this could have easily been 1:40:03 watching some nerdy guys on a
| recorded google meet drone on and on about their accomplishment
| and I'm glad it wasnt!
| fermentation wrote:
| This was super interesting and I think the results are beautiful.
| I'm imagining how cool it would be for game with a photo mode to
| have a film simulation mode.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Brilliant, it's like running a VM inside in a VM. I love how the
| images have a character due to the lens and simulation
| characteristics, It should be possible to train a diffusion model
| which can generate these and make it obsolete though.
| plastic3169 wrote:
| Reminds me of "how to animate cube in Houdini"
| -https://youtu.be/NLiL0GLSvIw
| antonjs wrote:
| This is so delightfully ridiculous. I wonder how many folks
| come across it looking for a nice beginner tutorial.
| mozman wrote:
| Very interesting but wow does this remind me of how little I
| know. I understood exactly zero of this.
| warent wrote:
| The only thing I knew was that when light goes through a
| pinhole in a box just right, for some reason it creates a large
| upside down projection on the opposite side haha
|
| Everything in this video is just a flurry of mad genius and
| gobbledygook jargon. Loved every second of it
| EA-3167 wrote:
| The nice thing about pinhole cameras is that you can explain
| it all with simple geometry:
| https://www.alternativephotography.com/how-a-pinhole-
| camera-...
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| Yes!!! The best part about this is that it significantly reduces
| the urge I've had for years to do it myself.
| hughes wrote:
| It amplified mine and made me start imagining a world where
| cinematic CGI production integrates a process like this.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Were you also left with the worry that motion blur was being
| neglected??
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| I think this is reasonable. If nothing else, it is the
| aspect least possible to imitate. If included, the best
| imitation would be cheap strobing. Anything better than
| that would require synthesis, which is something that even
| rendering engines require significant sacrifices to
| produce.
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| More power to you!
| reaperman wrote:
| This video is one of the greatest works of art that I've seen in
| such a long time. Not to even mention all the engineering that
| went into it.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| If anyone wants to play with a (probably much simpler) blender
| model of a lens, here's a link:
| https://studio.blender.org/blog/camera-lenses-with-caustics/
|
| What I've personally always wondered is if you could make a
| liquid crystal or electrochromatic diaphragm to get perfectly
| circular bokeh (or maybe even smooth-edge STF bokeh) on demand.
| Would probably kill the T-stop value when full open due to less
| than perfect transmissivity though..
|
| I also wonder what would happen if you could substitute an angle-
| limited piece of glass (kind of like a privacy screen - visible
| head-on but opaque from an angle) instead of the diaphragm.
| thenickdude wrote:
| You can get smooth-edged bokeh in a physical lens by inserting
| an apodisation filter inside:
|
| http://www.4photos.de/camera-diy/Apodization-Filter.html
|
| This is an aperture with fuzzy soft edges so that the bokeh
| fades out smoothly around the edges instead of being formed of
| hard circles.
|
| It makes the images look like they have Photoshop- or
| cellphone-faked bokeh, because you end up with effectively a
| Gaussian blur in the background.
| [deleted]
| anjc wrote:
| Brilliant video
| dailyanchovy wrote:
| The amount of effort this must have taken is obscene. The creator
| made a physically accurate pin-hole camera and film inside
| Blender. I hadn't realised that this is even possible with
| existing off-the-shelf renderers, let alone open source software.
| What a blast to watch also.
|
| That is, the fact that the whole package (Blender + the author's
| work) emulates a physical camera inside an existing renderer is
| amazing to me.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Not just a pin-hole camera. Later in the video he builds a
| multi-element lens too!
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| The magic of digital goods is that you only need to produce them
| once. This guy put in all the work and now can just copy paste it
| wherever and have it always ready
| jancsika wrote:
| I misunderstood title as "Modeling a Film Camera inside a Blender
| that is Plugged In and Running."
|
| Somehow the actual video was more interesting than that. :)
|
| Still, I need a UML diagram to understand what is meant by "fake
| camera inside the real fake camera."
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I think it was "the [Blender concept of 'camera'] inside the
| [camera I modeled in Blender]".
| lostdog wrote:
| This simulated camera projects the image onto an internal film
| plane. But blender cannot read an image off a plane directly,
| so you need to point a blender camera at the film plane to
| capture the film to the blender output.
| rektide wrote:
| Why stop there?
|
| There was a great project that I keep forgetting the name of /
| link to... It simulated the chemical process of developing film.
|
| I keep wanting to dig it up & play with it. Such a neat effort.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| This project is simulating film. That's the part about having
| three planes. There even is an explanation of tweaking each
| plane colour sensitivity.
| belugacat wrote:
| Perhaps https://filmulator.org
| zokier wrote:
| Another film simulation project, filmbox, got discussed few
| months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713202
| karmakaze wrote:
| I knew it! Video games are how simulation universes come to
| be.
| Renaud wrote:
| Amazing to be able to recreate a functioning camera on first
| principles. So much work but the result is totally worth it!
| crote wrote:
| To me, the best part is that most of it is just an emergent
| property of raytracing. Once you implement the core physics
| needed for any raytracer, things like lenses and aperture
| blades _just work_.
|
| I can't want for full-scene realtime raytracing to hit the
| consumer market.
| constantly wrote:
| This is where I'm losing track of what's going on here. I
| generally understand the principles from at least the first
| half of the video, the pinhole camera and lenses and can
| imagine how it works in real life, but this is blender. It's
| not real life. How does this work in BLENDER? Is it because
| the underlying physics models in Blender are so accurate one
| can recreate even these increasingly convoluted things in
| real life?
| crote wrote:
| Well, that's the best part of it: the underlying physics
| model is really easy!
|
| A pinhole camera requires zero additional physics, just a
| simulation of light rays passing through a small hole. A
| lens just requires Snell's Law - which is pretty much
| trivial. Adding dispersion is just a matter of using a
| formula instead of a constant for the refractive index of
| the lens, and doing the raytracing using random wavelengths
| instead of a single "composite" one.
|
| Raytracers capable of doing this are implemented in a few
| hundred lines of code as a toy project. The difficult part
| is getting it to render _quickly_ - and of course modeling
| the scene properly.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| The physics of light is _relatively_ simple. Blender wants
| to look photorealistic, so cycles (a branched path tracer,
| commonly known as a ray tracer) almost perfectly models how
| light works. That means these emergent properties _just
| work_.
|
| It wouldn't work under a rasteriser (Blender has one,
| called Eevee) as those operate using a complex series of
| approximations of reality that are more difficult to create
| but run far faster. But because Cycles (slower, but more
| realistic) operates by mimicking how light works this kind
| of thing is entirely possible.
| turnsout wrote:
| Also keep in mind that Cycles and most renderers use a
| _simplified_ version of physics--rather than pathtrace
| all wavelengths, they use a simplified RGB model, which
| means certain optical properties behave differently. For
| instance, you don't get the chromatic aberration with the
| simulated lens.
| terribleperson wrote:
| In a similar vein, when raycasting was being added to second
| life I built a rudimentary approximation of a camera. It took
| some time to put together an image because of the limits of
| SL scripting and the rate limits on raycasting, but the first
| successful image had incredibly obvious vignetting. The
| solution was changing the size of my 'aperture' equivalent.
|
| It's always very cool when simulation behavior starts to
| resemble real behavior.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I just keep remembering the original Half Life 'can your
| computer handle this test' and thinking "This is the absolute
| height of tech, footage from within a game displayed in-game,
| live."
|
| And now... I mean my god. This video made me feel both
| incredibly excited, and terribly old.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I used to wonder what Rendezvous With Rama's landscape would
| really look like if I were standing on its inner surface. Same
| with The Stone from Greg Bear's Eon. The renders I've seen so far
| have all looked too small, or everything is too clear.
|
| Maybe simulating something closer to the eye, or a 35mm camera,
| would give me what I've dreamed about. What do these places look
| like with clear skies, and then with clouds? 2 metres "up" from
| the inner surface, what does that really look like?
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(page generated 2023-07-02 23:01 UTC)