unpopular
Been spending a lot of time on here!
The latest version of Renderman has been released, Version 21, which includes a number of optimizations to render out physically accurate lighting:
https://rendermansite.pixar.com/ca_twopointo_cms_data/images/13550_23845_me.jpg
While probably not really useful for estimating real-world lens performance, this demo is nonetheless very interesting. I've seen this sort of thing before, mind you, using Luxrender, and I am sure that Maxwell could handle this kind of simulation as well (in a few days of render time), but I've never seen it to this level of sophistication and certainly not in something you'd actually use in production.
Aside from software that is really designed for this, attempting to do this sort of thing will end up with photons not coming anywhere close to a cohesive image.
In any case, it's a pretty impressive demo and it's no wonder that recent Renderman projects such as The Jungle Book, The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory the light feels so much more natural than was available even a few years prior and if "photography is about light" so must photorealism.
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wait a bit for the non-commercial release.
https://rendermansite.pixar.com/ca_twopointo_cms_data/images/13550_23845_me.jpg
While probably not really useful for estimating real-world lens performance, this demo is nonetheless very interesting. I've seen this sort of thing before, mind you, using Luxrender, and I am sure that Maxwell could handle this kind of simulation as well (in a few days of render time), but I've never seen it to this level of sophistication and certainly not in something you'd actually use in production.
Aside from software that is really designed for this, attempting to do this sort of thing will end up with photons not coming anywhere close to a cohesive image.
In any case, it's a pretty impressive demo and it's no wonder that recent Renderman projects such as The Jungle Book, The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory the light feels so much more natural than was available even a few years prior and if "photography is about light" so must photorealism.
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wait a bit for the non-commercial release.
