Blender – In the Mind of Chris

So I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4 and wanted to see how it compares to the Pi 3 in terms of cpu power. Turns out there really is quite a practical difference!

In this very simple example scene, I have the standard “Default Cube” with a basic principled shader and no effects, and a 1K hdri map from www.hdrihaven.com as the background. I left it at 128 samples, and 50% size, which is 960×540.

The Pi 3 renders this example scene in 2 minutes and 8 seconds.

The Pi 4 does this in just over 45 seconds!

As a point of comparison, my Ryzen 2700x will take 20.2 seconds to render this, single threaded. Not really a fair comparison, but it does show that the Pi4 can be almost half as fast as a single desktop thread, in some workloads. It does, however get pretty hot doing this if you only have a heatsink, and no fan attached.

Here is my latest work in blender. It’s taken longer than it probably should, but I took a few diversions to study GI probes in Eevee, and light baking. I ended up just rendering with cycles, however I found much better results using the branched path tracer.

I found a few resources to help with the lighting, which I think helped me out a lot. It turns out cycles lights are physically based. I never knew what the values meant before. Sun lamps and environment maps are measured in Watts/square meter, and according to one site, the sun should be set around 441, with the environment map at around 27. That corresponds to real light measurements. Initially I thought it was too high, but after tweaking the exposure, I think it turned out really good.

This was my first render, and the lighting doesn’t feel right to me. This was before I set the environment lighting to correct values, and the interior lights are too white. To fix them, I used the blackbody node for color, set to around 4100K. They also use some IES light textures to make them light more like real light bulbs.

This is an old render, from December 2018. It was my second attempt at an archiviz render.

Here is version 3, made shortly after version 2. I think there is a lot of progress from these to the latest render, even though the newest one doesn’t yet have any of the extra items like stools, coffee maker etc.

Tag: Blender

Raspberry Pi 4 Blender Benchmarks

Archiviz