Bloom Unit, Interactive Cloud and Local GPU Rendering

Jordan_migenius · February 7, 2019, 12:27am

This is a thread that is being created by the migenius team, who are the developers of Bloom Unit. This thread will be monitored by us, so if you have any questions, feedback, observations, general discussion or if you’d like to show off some of those lovely renders you’ve done which you’d like us and others to see, this is the place to do it.

Of course if you have a specific topic, feel free to start another thread, you can also link to your dedicated thread here if you like. We are also available for direct contact via jordan@bloomunit.com

Jordan_migenius · February 7, 2019, 12:38am

Just to start things off on the thread, i’m going to post a few renders that I have made in Bloom unit from a small scene that was put together from scratch and rendered out within a few hours. Most of the assets within the scene are from SketchUps in program 3DWarehouse, but all rendering aspects and lighting were done within Bloom Unit. If there’s anything that you’d like to ask, then by all means ask away.

Jordan_migenius · February 7, 2019, 4:29am

For those of us among the Bloom Unit team, we know all too well how precious your time is and we want to save you as much of it as possible.

To show you what we mean, i’m adding a short video to this post demonstrating what kind of quality you can get out of Bloom Unit using a local GPU. With just 5 seconds of rendering time per 720p converged image, you could get this time down even further using cloud rendering.

(Using Bloom Unit to create HD Movies at Unbelievable Speeds - YouTube)

Jordan_migenius · February 13, 2019, 2:59am

So i’ve added some clothing to my scene from a few days ago. The clothing came from 3Dwarehouse and FormFonts which I used to fill in the wardrobe a bit, but I ran into an issue because of it. My scene size more than doubled from just a few objects, my SketchUp scene and my Bloom Unit render viewport were taking a really long time to initialize because of it. But this would also be the case for any other external renderer for SketchUp, as there’s just more geometry to render overall.

I do have a solution which works most of the time, by using the cleanup³ extension in sketchup, I’m able to fix up some of the issues with meshes and remove unneeded geometry and other aspects of the mesh. Using cleanup³ is also a great way to reduce the overall file size of your scene without changing the visual aspect of the objects. This tends to speeds up most aspects of sketchup up as well as reducing your upload time when launching the Bloom Unit renderer.

I’ve gone through the scene and cleaned up some of the meshes, I was able to get the scene running efficiently again after reducing the file size by about 30% of what it was after adding the new clothing models. Here is the result which I was able to get out of Bloom Unit.

Although this extension generally does fix the problem for me, and is great to have. Depending on the complexity of the models that you’re trying to cleanup, it can take a bit of time to clean it up. If anyone has any other methods of fixing their scenes or getting things to run more efficiently, please let me know as i’d quite like to learn more about it.

Jordan_migenius · February 15, 2019, 3:04am

Rendering technology has moved forward to the next stage, and Bloom Unit is staying at the forefront of those advances with many changes and updates in and since the release of Bloom Unit 2 a few months ago.

One of the things Bloom Unit takes advantage of is NVIDIA’s AI Denoising technology and that allows us to be able to create our renders at remarkable speeds. Which is changing the way we think about rendering, no longer are we needing to set aside a massive amount of time just to wait for rendering to finish. It’s all moving closer and closer to real time rendering, which might not be too far off using cloud technology.

With the implementation of NVIDIA’s AI Denoising technology in Bloom Unit 2’s release, Bloom Unit is now is able to produce high quality photo-real images at 10-20 times the speed of what it was before. This is how we are able to achieve near real time imagery in your render viewport, speeding up your workflow and saving you time. While needless to say, always at a photorealistic quality level.

Below is a Video comparison showing what it is like when you’re using NVIDIA’s AI Denoising function within Bloom Unit for 10 seconds, but also showing us when you aren’t using the AI Denoiser but over a span of 10 minutes. The amount of time this feature could save you is ridiculous.

(Bloom Unit's NVIDIA AI Denoiser, 10 seconds with vs 10 minutes without - YouTube)

Jordan_migenius · February 18, 2019, 9:47pm

Hey fellow SketchUp users, i’m going to talk about a few different aspects of the lighting design and features within Bloom Unit over my next couple of posts, this doesn’t cover every aspect of lighting within Bloom Unit just a select few.

The topics which I’ll mention are Diffuse Transmission, Caustics, Specular Reflection, Daylight Contribution, Luminance, Illuminance and Luminaires using IES files. But for now let’s start off with some information about why those of us who work on Bloom Unit, want to bring you, true photorealistic imagery.

All of us at migenius and those of us who are Bloom Unit team members, have developed and used many types of 3D rendering software, but it’s always been a struggle to achieve actual photorealistic imagery, no other rendering package has been able to achieve the quality that we were wanting, but Bloom Unit has.

With many of the rendering packages out today forcing you to fake aspects of lighting within your scene to try and make it look realistic, although you can get quite high quality beauty renders using these methods that may look realistic, in the end it’s faked and it can be completely different from a real life counterpart.

The fact of the matter is, let’s just say you’re showing a client whom you’re designing a house or store for, and you’re showing what it’s going to look like. Sure the images can look realistic enough, but it wont turn out exactly the same in reality while using other packages. True photo-realism and something that looks realistic can become worlds apart quite easily.

With Bloom Unit we push for true photo-realism as we want you to be able to show your clients, viewers or whomever it might be, exactly what your creations are going to look like in reality, not just a beauty render of what it might look or how it could turn out.

Lastly i’m adding 2 images, one of which was made in Bloom Unit and is showing a kitchen renovation design. The other is the final result in real life after the after the renovation was completed. Although the lighting conditions are a little different, Bloom unit was able to achieve a highly realistic image representation of exactly what the end product was going to be.

Jordan_migenius · February 21, 2019, 4:55am

Time for a bit of a topic that can get overlooked quite easily but needs to be taken into account if you want to go for truly realistic renders.

As an additional option in Bloom Unit, caustics are able to be turned on interactively via the render settings window under the Renderer tab. Although caustics aren’t required to be on while using Bloom Unit, caustics are going to be needed if you are trying to achieve complete photorealism and you have objects that will benefit from caustics.

If light needs to be refracted or transmitted through certain scene materials, such as glass or liquids these are the times to use caustics. With Bloom Unit you should always be striving for photorealism as that’s what Bloom Unit’s been created for.

The way that caustics work are by calculating the photons of light which originate from your light source no matter what or where it is or how many there are, these photons of light are able to be reflected, refracted or bounced off of objects and their materials, this is able to more accurately simulate the way that real light behaves within a scene.

What this means is basically, instead of light just moving straight through the object. It allows the light to be bent through certain materials and objects which is more life like, while also using the materials to change the pass-through light attributes such as its colour and direction, or if it is passing through a liquid or a coloured glass bottle for example.

Caustics drastically change how the shadows and reflections of your partially transparent objects appear and probably aren’t noticed very well unless there’s a side by side image of the two.