Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?
Pixar's Render Farm
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Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#52Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#53If there's a generally static scene with just characters walking through it, does the render take advantage of rendering the static parts for the whole scene once, and then overlay and recompute the small differences caused by the moving things in each individual sub frame?
Or, alternatively what "class" of optimizations does something like that fall into?
Is rendering of video games more similar to rendering for movies, or for VFX?
What are some of physics "cheats" that look good enough but massively reduce compute intensity?
What are some interesting scaling laws about compute intensity / time versus parameters that the film director may have to choose between? "Director X, you can have but that means to fit in the budget, we can't do "
Can anyone point to a nice introduction to some of the basic compute-relevant techniques that rendering uses? Thanks!
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#54Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?
High end VFX/CG usually tessellates geometry down to micropolygon, so you roughly have 1 quad (or two triangles) per pixel in terms of geometry density, so you can often have > 150,000,000 polys in a scene, along with per vertex primvars to control shading, and many textures (which can be paged fairly well with shade on hit).
Using ray tracing pretty much means having all that in memory at once (paging sucks in general of geo and accel structures, it's been tried in the past) so that intersection / traversal is fast.
Doing lookdev on individual assets (i.e. turntables) is one place where GPU rendering can be used as the memory requirements are much smaller, but only if the look you get is identical to the one you get using CPU rendering, which isn't always the case (some of the algorithms are hard to get working correctly on GPUs, i.e. volumetrics).
Renderman (the renderer Pixar use, and create in Seattle) isn't really GPU ready yet (they're attempting to release XPU this year I think).
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#55I've heard rumors that Pixar used to be able to render their movies in real-time :)
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#56I would love to know about some curious questions, for example: If there's a generally static scene with just characters walking through it, does the render take advantage of rendering the static parts for the whole scene once , and then overlay and recompute the small differences caused by the moving things in each individual sub frame? Or, alternatively what "class" of optimizations does something like that fall in…
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. All I saw was a post with zero context, followed by a reply, followed by another reply using a different reply delineator (a horizontal break instead of a vertical line??), followed by nothing. It just ends. It's hard to believe this is real and intended.
It's amazing to me that people find twitter difficult to read... I mean it's not perfect but it's not an ovaltine decoder ring, either. Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" You're human; THE most adaptable creature known. Adapt! I'm not saying that twitter UX is perfect, or even good. I AM saying that it is usable.
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#58Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#59For those that can't stand Twitter's UI: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345146328058269696.html
It's very painful to follow a conversation on Twitter. I'm not sure why they think the way they've done things makes sense.
People were supposed to shoot short, simple, single messages and other people maybe react to this with their own short, single messages.
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#60My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…
Wait, what? 24 hours per frame?! At the standard 24fps it takes you 24 days per film second which works out to 473 years for the average 2 hour long film which can't be right.
My experience running massive pipelines is that there's a limited amount of parallelization you can do. It's not like you can just slice the frame into rectangles and farm them out.