Hey, first I want to say that the engine looks VERY promising and I’d love to use it as soon as it comes out!
Second, I have two questions, which the title pretty much gave away:
What are the sys reqs for the host and target machine?
I would like to target some pretty low-end machines and it’s not entirely clear how much of the (frankly beautiful) effects can be stripped away?
How NPR can I go?
AFAIK the render passes are just nodes and as such are completely customisable, so how easy would it be to implement something like cell shading?
Since materials are based on Cycles nodes, can I just use the cartoon shader? I get that the demos so far focused on PBR as that is what catches most viewers, but I’m curious about how low and grungy or trippy it can get.
All I know is that Luboš has been working on targeting reasonable FPS on an integrated Intel GPU (admittedly one of the stronger ones, may be the HD 5000 if I remember correctly). If the deferred path can run reasonably well there, and there’s an alternative higher performance forward rendering path, I’d predict you can expect sustainable performance.
So far as NPR, your guess is as good as mine, but the rendering path looks highly customizable so I wouldn’t say it’s impossible or even difficult to achieve. I suppose the real question there is whether we can expect boosted performance while using NPR-like materials and shaders. I suppose a lot of it will be up to us to work out the kinks since it’s not really the primary focus of the project.
I have been adding browser demos to http://armory3d.org/download.html. The most stripped one is ‘Forward Low - no MSAA’, which should run even in the mobile browser. When doing a ‘standard - native’ build, it will boost performance further, as obviously browser tends to slow things down. On the other hand, the demos available so far are super primitive. In the end, you should be able to strip down as much as needed.
There is some toon shading code but currently it’s disabled. But once done it should work by using the cartoon shader node. If the performance will not be ideal, we might try to cook up a separate render path for toon rendering only with specific shaders. But ideally everything should be optimized away if only toon shading is used, to make it easier.
Digged up one old cell-shading screen, it’s super ugly as the outline is broken but that should be easy to fix.
Hello. I just purchased it today.
Before opening a new thread I prefer to reply here.
An official section on the site about the system requirements would be nice.
Since this engine is heavily based in Cycles, I assume it’s going to inherit from it some of it’s problems.
For example, Cycles still doesn’t work well with AMD cards
(from the blender Manual https://www.blender.org/manual/render/cycles/features.html you can observe several
x in the AMD table). And I think this also affects stabitlity.
I currently cannot use the ‘Play in viewport’ option, since it crashes to desktop. I dont’ know if my AMD card is the reason or not. So a section which describes recommended systems requirements or configurations would be ok.
I also have an AMD graphic card and it works rather well. If you want to use the Play in Viewport option, you need to open blender.exe that is inside the Armory folder, not the version you have installed with the addon loaded in.
If you are already using that blender version, then you could try different render path and see which one is causing you issue. (select camera, go down the the Armory section and change the render path there).
Thanks for reporting your issues! What AMD card/OS version do you run? There ‘should’ be no issues with AMD cards in Armory, but built-in player still appears unstable on some setups, have to step it up.
I will add a note about the system requirements to the download page. If you can run this minimal demo then Armory has to run on the system, at least when not pushed too much. http://armory3d.org/demo/animation/forward_low/
If you start Blender from terminal/command line and let it crash, is there any output printed? Does it work in separate window if you hit ‘Play’(F5) in Properties - Render tab - Armory Play? Also, it’s totally cool to start new thread if you wish.
When I downloaded the armory engine, I executed from the blender.exe executable that comes inside the Armory folder,
but, since I am a maniac, I wanted to diferentiate that blender from the blender.exe I use normally. Therefore I changed the name to Armory.exe
I just have renamed it to blender.exe, and it works now on the viewport. It always worked in a different window,
