douyeszn/sparserenderformer-cycles

SparseRenderFormer Cycles references

Path-traced references in RenderFormer's exact HDF5 schema, so they load with RenderFormer's own tooling unchanged.

Why this exists

RenderFormer was trained on two million scenes and sixteen million Cycles renders, and neither the scenes nor the sampler that produced them was released. Without a path-traced reference, a modified architecture can only be evaluated against RenderFormer's own output, which cannot distinguish "matches the teacher" from "renders correctly".

Contents

• cycles/h5/ — 59 scenes, RenderFormer HDF5 schema
• cycles/renders/ — Blender Cycles references, 4096 adaptive spp with denoising, 256x256, EXR
• cycles/scenes/, cycles/meshes/ — scene JSON and OBJ, to re-render or modify
• large_16384/, large_32768/ — 60 larger scenes, exported but not yet rendered

Protocol

Cycles at 4096 adaptive samples per pixel with denoising, at 256x256. This matches what RenderFormer and RenderFormer++ both report, verified against their papers rather than assumed.

Validation

The released microsoft/renderformer-v1-base checkpoint scores 31.23 dB over 20 of these scenes, against the 29.8 dB RenderFormer reports at this resolution. Scoring slightly above is expected: these scenes are simpler than the asset-derived ones their test set is built from.

Limitations, stated plainly

• 59 scenes is enough for a pipeline check or an ablation, and not enough to train a renderer. A controlled sweep on this data found PSNR moving 4.53 dB purely with training-set size, so treat results fine-tuned on it as bounded by the data rather than by the method.
• Rendered scenes cap at 3,841 triangles. The larger splits exist but their references are not rendered yet.
• Images are EXR and genuinely high dynamic range. Read them with a backend that preserves that: OpenCV's default EXR path clips to 1.0 and drops alpha, which is silent and ruins training.

Attribution

Objects derive from Objaverse; see ATTRIBUTION.md for per-object licences. Renders and derived geometry only, never the original meshes.