Lentil is an advanced camera toolkit for the Arnold renderer. It is a set of shaders that extends creative control and physical correctness, while significantly reducing the time (~30x) needed to render bokeh through bidirectional sampling of camera rays.
By decoupling camera rays from primary rays, our bidirectional adaptive sampling of bokeh makes rendering depth of field in-camera much quicker. Our mission is to completely remove the necessity to use post-production defocusing tools.
Lentil works in a similar fashion to a deep-exr zdefocus, embedded into the renderer. However - due to access to the raw sample data and the capability to trace rays in the scene, the result is more accurate, without the common artefacts that come with a 2D solution.
![Default Arnold Sampling [equal time comparison, 10AA].](./assets/img/lentil-comparison-motherboard-10AA-arnolddefault.png)
![With Lentil Enabled [equal time comparison, 5AA].](./assets/img/lentil-comparison-motherboard-5AA-bidirectional.png)
![Arnold Default Thin Lens [30s, 8AA]](./assets/img/arnold_default_thinlens_30s_compressed.jpg)
![Lentil Thin-Lens Bidirectional [30s, 5AA]](./assets/img/lentil_thinlens_30s_compressed.jpg)
![Arnold Default Thin-Lens [15m, 40AA] - Unpractical for any production scene](./assets/img/arnold_default_40aa_10m_cc_compressed.jpg)
![Lentil Bidir (Cooke Speed Panchro) [10m, 5AA]](./assets/img/lentil_bidirectional_5AA_10m_cc_compressed.jpg)
Polynomial optics is the state-of-the-art in fast, physically plausible lens simulation. This camera model uses real lens data, but precalculates it in a way that all information about the lens is discarded. This means there is no performance difference between a lens with 5 or 25 optical elements.
Many times faster than pota due to bidirectional sampling
Takes data from lens patents (render through a 1900's Petzal, 1930's Cooke Speed Panchro or any of the available lenses)
Physically correct distortion, coma, astigmatism, field curvature, spherical aberration & optical vignetting
Prime lenses only
We extended the classical thin-lens model with additional creative control, while also significantly improving the performance.
Many times faster than default Arnold camera (~30x), achieved by decoupling camera rays from primary rays
Uses common controls found on cameras, such as f-stop.
Optical Vignetting (Cateye bokeh)
Anamorphic bokeh
Image-based bokeh
Add additional luminance to bokeh only
Circle to square transitions (useful for anamorphic looks)
Coma aberration
Empirical Chromatic aberration
To get clean, sharp bokeh - very small bright highlights need to be sampled. Unfortunately this is a tricky scenario for a unidirectional pathtracer, resulting in an unpractical amount of required AA samples. Lentil is designed to give Arnold a (bidirectional) hand in these scenarios. AA samples can be left at a reasonable amount, and bokeh will be supersampled without having to trace each camera ray throughout the whole scene.
Adaptive bidirectional sampling
For each first ray-path vertex, Lentil decided if its energy should get re-integrated backwards through the lens. No need to oversample the whole scene only to clean up the out of focus regions.
Implemented into custom camera shader, filter & imager
Cleaned up bokeh is pushed to the IPR during the render through the use of a custom Arnold imager. The setup is done automatically by the custom camera shader, making the setup fail-proof. Check out the docs for your DCC-specific workflow.
Custom cryptomatte implementation
Cryptomatte is fully supported.
I believe software should be available for free - to learn, experiment and inspire. Therefore, Lentil is available for free for everyone using it for non-commercial projects.
Download LentilThis license is for usage on commercial projects. The license covers 1 machine.
A one week trial license is automatically included.
Buy LentilThis license is for usage on commercial projects. The license covers 9999 machines.
A one week trial license is automatically included.
Buy LentilIn theory, all of them. Tailored interface files are supplied for MtoA, HtoA, C4dToA & KtoA. MaxtoA should work as well, but since I do not test on this platform, I do not officially "support" it.
Yes. All future updates are included. No strings attached.
Arnold does not yet support custom plugins for the GPU. If this becomes available, you can be sure I'll look into it.
It's the best place to get quick help with your issues: https://discord.gg/SyKPKqtHxp
That's always a fun one. Software is written by humans & mistakes are a part of life. Please let me know (email/discord) and I'll look into it. Include a repro-scene for karma points.
Core: > 7.1.1.0
MtoA: > 5.1.1.0
C4dToA: > 4.2.0
HtoA: > 6.1.1.0
MaxToA: > 5.2.0.0