Blender Bridge : Opening the Path to AMD ProRender

artphobe

When I first saw the bridge updates (today), the first thing that popped into my head was that Daz3D users could now utilize AMD's graphics cards to render scenes.

I used to have the Fury and Vega cards and would have loved to test out AMD's ProRender - but now all I got is a 1080 Ti.

Any AMD GPU users out there happy with the official bridge from Daz? Which bridge is best suited to utilize AMD's GPUs for rendering.

nicstt

Nvidia cards work with the Pro Renderer.

I haven't tried it out yet; I use Cycles, which also uses AMD, Nvidia and CPUs.

My Threadripper 1950x is faster than my 980ti. So I saved myself some cash a while back; now I'm watching what the new offerings from Nvidia and AMD are going to be like; then there's Intel's new cards due in some months time.

nonesuch00

Well without editing the Cycles surfaces to use AMD Pro Render's supplied materials in Blender 2.8.3.+ GPU Compute with an AMD GPU was very buggy.  And worse, just changing to the Pro Renderer renderer and leaving the materials in the scene as cycles materials would crash the Pro Renderer and Blender would spin it's wheels doing nothing. I speak of any of the example Blender Splash Screens and example Scenes Blender.org supplies on their demo page (has demo scenes from 2.79+ using cycles & EEVEE)

nicstt

I like Cycles; I get the results I like (mostly) from Cycles so haven't a burning need to try it out, although I will at some stage.

I don't really care what render engine I'm using, only the results and options for using it with any given card/cpu matter to me.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

nonesuch00 said:

Well without editing the Cycles surfaces to use AMD Pro Render's supplied materials in Blender 2.8.3.+ GPU Compute with an AMD GPU was very buggy.  And worse, just changing to the Pro Renderer renderer and leaving the materials in the scene as cycles materials would crash the Pro Renderer and Blender would spin it's wheels doing nothing. I speak of any of the example Blender Splash Screens and example Scenes Blender.org supplies on their demo page (has demo scenes from 2.79+ using cycles & EEVEE)

@nonesuch00 I never unsderstood that process... So Pro Render uses different shader nodes from Cycles and EEVEE? All of the gorgeous Cycles material made by Poliigon, for example, are no good with Pro Render? Where would one get quality materials to use with it, then?

nonesuch00

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

nonesuch00 said:

Well without editing the Cycles surfaces to use AMD Pro Render's supplied materials in Blender 2.8.3.+ GPU Compute with an AMD GPU was very buggy.  And worse, just changing to the Pro Renderer renderer and leaving the materials in the scene as cycles materials would crash the Pro Renderer and Blender would spin it's wheels doing nothing. I speak of any of the example Blender Splash Screens and example Scenes Blender.org supplies on their demo page (has demo scenes from 2.79+ using cycles & EEVEE)

@nonesuch00 I never unsderstood that process... So Pro Render uses different shader nodes from Cycles and EEVEE? All of the gorgeous Cycles material made by Poliigon, for example, are no good with Pro Render? Where would one get quality materials to use with it, then?

Well, I was being too much of a Jeremiah as they have a convert button & it mostly works but you still have to manually do some fixing sometimes. I guess when I hear that something is PBR I expect them (the PBR renderers) all to be able to use the same PBR materials in the same way without jumping through hoops but I don't even know of one instance of where that's the case. 

Pro Renderer comes with it's own PBR library for materials you want to replace instead of convert or manually convert in in some cases.

Here these explain better than me but no, you can't just switch from cycles to ProRenderer renderer for a scene and the scene render in ProRender like you can in DAZ Studio going from 3DL to iRay (but not vice versa):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk7PIFwmLiE&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvJvkGXU3Pc&feature=youtu.be

The auto-conversion via a button is on the old Blender 2.79 version of ProRender 1.x. The new version really does autoconvert and is sort of successful. It converted the Junk Shop, poorly but it converted. If fails to convert the Agent 327 Barbershop (almost certainly because scripts are embedded in the barbershop scene).

So yeah, no surprise, you need to convert the materials yourself manually if you expect a good chance of it rendering how you want/expect it to look..