Both the classic interior and the modern exterior scenes were modeled in Cinema4D, for the interior I also used Marvelous Designer. I still haven’t modeled anything on an AS machine but from what I see I believe the performance should be extremely good, even compared to powerful desktops. The classic scene polycount is about 80 million real polygons plus several Billions via render instances, I’m not sure for the exterior scene, probably just 2/3 million real polygons plus render instances and Vray Cosmos assets.
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3D Rendering on Apple Silicon, CPU&GPU
- Thread starter vel0city
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Thanks. Again wonderful detailed work ! More of than not I see a lot of mograph and high gloss strawberries in yoghurt type work in c4d (no offence to those who make them)
I am looking for a good cg app (jumping ship from Modo) that runs native on AS. Looks like c4d fits the bill.
Maybe Blender too.
I am looking for a good cg app (jumping ship from Modo) that runs native on AS. Looks like c4d fits the bill.
Maybe Blender too.
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c4d looks great, but it's starting to get very expensive to do 3D as a hobbyist who only does modelling and sculpting a few times a month. I'm already giving Adobe $50 / month, I don't want to have to give Maxon ~$100 / month too (especially if ZBrush ends up subscription too)
It feels like the perfect environment for Apple to come out with the 3D equivalent of Logic Pro or Final Cut, and suddenly start attracting amateurs with the pitch of "Yeah, our hardware is more expensive, but wouldn't you rather pay $200 once for pro level software, and not a few thousand a year?"
Especially as Apple are supposedly coming out with a VR headset in 2022, and AR after that, with the idea that these devices are going to replace the iPhone: the demand for 3D content is going to explode. The iPhone succeeded in part because literally anyone can learn to make apps even if they're 12 years old and have no money. That's not the case in 3D content creation at the moment (with the exception of Blender), where you need a decent amount of money just to get a foot in the door.
Not to mention most 3D software is unnecessarily complicated, with often incredibly weird non-standard UIs that are very much the opposite of Apple's own design philosophy of making things simple and accessible to as many people as possible.
In short, hey Apple, if you want your VR / AR dream to succeed, buy Maxon.
It feels like the perfect environment for Apple to come out with the 3D equivalent of Logic Pro or Final Cut, and suddenly start attracting amateurs with the pitch of "Yeah, our hardware is more expensive, but wouldn't you rather pay $200 once for pro level software, and not a few thousand a year?"
Especially as Apple are supposedly coming out with a VR headset in 2022, and AR after that, with the idea that these devices are going to replace the iPhone: the demand for 3D content is going to explode. The iPhone succeeded in part because literally anyone can learn to make apps even if they're 12 years old and have no money. That's not the case in 3D content creation at the moment (with the exception of Blender), where you need a decent amount of money just to get a foot in the door.
Not to mention most 3D software is unnecessarily complicated, with often incredibly weird non-standard UIs that are very much the opposite of Apple's own design philosophy of making things simple and accessible to as many people as possible.
In short, hey Apple, if you want your VR / AR dream to succeed, buy Maxon.
C4D is never yours, gotta pay that sub fee, whereas Blender is free...!
I remember going to Siggraph in the mid-1990's, looking at the (then) new O2 workstations and alias|wavefront PowerAnimator software; I want to say one was looking at about US$100k for a decently outfitted O2 workstation & PowerAnimator software (and I don't even think the PA was all the modules)...?
If Apple were to purchase Maxon, I could see a Final Cut Pro / Logic Pro / Maxon One DCC software suite for US$1k as a heck of a deal...!
In short, hey Apple, if you want your VR / AR dream to succeed, buy Maxon.
That would be pretty sweet, now I am envisioning a "modern O2" (aka a possible M1 Max Duo/Quad-powered Mac Pro Cube) & DCC software suite (Final Cut Pro / Logic Pro / Maxon One) for less than the cost of a bare bones base model SGI O2 from the mid-1990's...! ;^p
Nah, Maxon are looking at Adobe for the big money...c4d looks great, but it's starting to get very expensive to do 3D as a hobbyist who only does modelling and sculpting a few times a month. I'm already giving Adobe $50 / month, I don't want to have to give Maxon ~$100 / month too (especially if ZBrush ends up subscription too)
It feels like the perfect environment for Apple to come out with the 3D equivalent of Logic Pro or Final Cut, and suddenly start attracting amateurs with the pitch of "Yeah, our hardware is more expensive, but wouldn't you rather pay $200 once for pro level software, and not a few thousand a year?"
Especially as Apple are supposedly coming out with a VR headset in 2022, and AR after that, with the idea that these devices are going to replace the iPhone: the demand for 3D content is going to explode. The iPhone succeeded in part because literally anyone can learn to make apps even if they're 12 years old and have no money. That's not the case in 3D content creation at the moment (with the exception of Blender), where you need a decent amount of money just to get a foot in the door.
Not to mention most 3D software is unnecessarily complicated, with often incredibly weird non-standard UIs that are very much the opposite of Apple's own design philosophy of making things simple and accessible to as many people as possible.
In short, hey Apple, if you want your VR / AR dream to succeed, buy Maxon.
I do think, however, that Apple is up to something in the 3d scene. They hired a couple of senior folks from the Modo team and the Metal work they have done for Blender is not without reason. The same goes for the work they did with Octane and RedShift devs. It will be interesting to see where they want to go with this, but it is clearly driven by VR/AR content.
To be honest, looking at the 3d interfaces in Preview / Reality Composer, definitely feel that Apple's not going to get to a decent 3D ui for AR / VR on their own; the ui in composer a bit non-insuitive and clunky and their integration of USD into preview is ... baffling. Buying Maxon would definitely get them there fast
Although my money's still on Apple bringing back Shake before venturing into 3D; just feels a better fit with Final Cut and their image processing pipeline. Shake with ML optimised root and grading tools would be awesome.
Such a shame. I feel when Luxology expanded Modo from Modelling, UV and Rendering pipeline and tried to bolt on other areas both the interface and UI suffered. If they sold a version of Modo which just did modelling for $250 I'd buy it in a flash. Been having a go with Blender but finding the tools and interface pretty painful (Modo really nailed the feel; from selection to modelling just it felt right).
Apple seem to have hired a few people from the 3D industry and, anecdotally, seem to pretty active helping the major developers fix bugs and get their programmes performing better on Apple hardware.
This kinda makes sense, as they're going all in on AR / VR and the models and data needs to be created somewhere. They also seem to be doing the right thing by adopting open standards, and are heavily pushing USDz as the format for for AR scenes.
That said, having been playing around with USDz the Apple documentation is not great and the implementation still leaves a lot to be desired; you can definitely see it inching closer to getting something really cool. I think they mentioned adding a dynamics schema, which is both awesome but also fills me with fear given how complex USD can get already...
C4D is a solid software, it’s easy to learn, very stable and runs natively. Depending on what you do it can be a good fit. I’m not a fan of the development in the recent years, the improvements are not revolutionary but constant nonetheless. R25 seems a poor release on the paper but in reality Ive noticed a very large jump in productivity because of the new layout.
Blender is a nice software too, not as easy and refined like C4D but have a good feature set, a large community and it’s free. There are many good CG artists that use it and like with any other software you can produce great things with it, that been said to be honest the vast majority of Blender fans are just hobbyist that doesn’t not want to pay for other software, of course there is nothing wrong with that
I tested it (Blender 3.1 alpha). It is much faster than CPU only rendering, but nowhere close on GPU rendering.
Compared to a desktop 3080ti (I know, not a fair comparison at ALL - but practically speaking that chip should be about 50% faster than an M1 Max)
Classroom demo scene: M1 Max Metal/GPU Compute with Cycles alpha: 1:45 (mm:ss), 3080ti desktop Optix: 00:19, for CUDA 00:23
Barbershop demo scene: M1 Max Metal/GPU Compute with Cycles alpha: 9:41 (mm:ss), 3080ti desktop Optix: 01:08 (I didn't test CUDA)
CPU only scores on M1 Max are 2-3x slower than these scores.
The 3080ti on the PC is like 8-9x faster.
My test had the GPU and CPU pinned on my M1 Max. The chip is nowhere near as fast as an Nvidia 30 series for Blender rendering. Even if they 2X the figures, it won't be close. This is all very preliminary though ... and I am no blender expert. I just loaded in the demo files, ensured the Metal renderer was selected, made sure GPU Compute was selected, and hit render frame. The CPU and GPU were pinned.
My desktop 3080ti was 8-9x faster. The modeling & viewport rendering on the Max is decent though, but for compute it's only about the same as a Vega 64. It's raster where it's much faster... for stuff like video editing/coloring/motion gfx. This chip is not a RT render beast by any stretch.
Can easily model fairly fluidly on the M1 Pro/Max and do a few little test renders, but move to a high powered desktop with an Nvidia card to render out. That's one scenario. I mean, it's a laptop. a FAST laptop, but still a laptop meant for very specific video/photo/audio kinds of workflows. Not 3D renders. Not gaming.
Tell me about it !
Modo still has the best direct modeling workflow.. and over the last two decades I have worked on many DCC apps.
Even with Blender’s new iteration + plethora of addons..I still think Modo has the edge. It’s modeling logic is sound.
Too bad it just is plain awful at working on large scenes.
And performance is wonky !
USD itself is a mess. Pixar makes great tech… but over complicates the workflow (looking at Renderman). It can’t seem to think beyond Studio/pipeline paradigm.
We still don't know the true potential of Blender in M1 Pro/Max. The performance of Cycles in Apple Silicon will improve as the Apple dev makes optimization. And, the viewport will get snappier with the future Metal backend. So, we should wait for Blender 3.2/3.3 to know how good M1 Pro/Max can be in Blender.
Will Blender get as good as other paid software with current pace and support?
This seems to imply that any serious rendering should be GPU based which is simply false, as a matter of facts any high end Hollywood blockbuster is still rendered using CPU (Renderman, Arnold, Vray or other proprietary engine). Even for my boutique studio GPU rendering isn’t enough because of the limitation. Of course there are many user case that can benefit from a fast GPU but rendering isn’t necessarily one of them. On the other end CPU rendering seems quite fast for a laptop, from my tests on real scenes (not simple benchmark with a bunch of polygons) it looks like a 12core desktop.
Yeah CPU perf is quite good.
Why does Renderman et al still render on CPU? They have XPU render (CPU+GPU) which is 3x faster but still not as good as the CPU implementation.
Brad did say he wanted to look into the AR/VR side of things when he left.
Interesting that he ended up at Apple.
Hopefully he can bring some influence to bear and get Modo working native on Apple AS.
While of course further blender optimizations may be coming and will improve the M1 scores, overall I think this is as expected, no? The 3080ti has dedicated RT cores that the M1 does not, the M1 Max is a 10 TFlop GPU similar to a Vega 64 (nuances here, but to a first order), and rasterization is where TBDR really shines as an architecture and allows the GPU to punch above its weight class.
The 3080ti yields more than 3x the FLOPS of the M1 Max, so you expect it to be more than 3x faster, and that's not even counting the RT cores.
M1 Max performance is understandable. It does kinda put a damper on the hype for the next Apple Silicon Mac Pro though unless it somehow gets RT hardware.
If a 3080 is 8-9x faster than the M1 Max, who is going to want 4x M1 Max's glued together? Half the performance for probably significantly more money? Not to mention the 4080 will probably be released next year and is rumoured to be a gigantic upgrade from the 3080.
I really want to be able to go full Mac only, but it looks like it might still be a few years away.
If a 3080 is 8-9x faster than the M1 Max, who is going to want 4x M1 Max's glued together? Half the performance for probably significantly more money? Not to mention the 4080 will probably be released next year and is rumoured to be a gigantic upgrade from the 3080.
I really want to be able to go full Mac only, but it looks like it might still be a few years away.
Cycles Apple Metal device feedback
The latest build 17th of December crashes in every render I try to do. Reverted back to the 16th build
It seems Blender for macOS works well now.
Cycles Apple Metal device feedback
The crash on macOS has been fixed and the latest build should work fine again.
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Do you have any link that talks about it?
Those programs use CUDA and Optix.