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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#181

Post by RantyDave »

supernova87a wrote: post #53

I 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…

> 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?

Not any more. It used to be that frames were rendered in bits then composited to make the final image. However, you then need lots of tricks to reflect what would have happened to the background as a result of the foreground ... shadows, for instance. So now the entire scene is given to the renderer and the renderer is told to get on with it.

Regarding physics cheats, it depends on the renderer but basically none. AI despeckling is making a huge difference to render times, however.

Directors don't get involved in scaling laws and stuff like that. Basically a studio has a "look" that they'll quote around.

Compute relevant techniques? A renderer basically solves the rendering equation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_equation

And have a look at Mitsuba! http://rgl.epfl.ch/publications/NimierDavidVicini2019Mitsuba...

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#182

Post by nikon »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #95

One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance. I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code…

Where can I watch the documentary?

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#184

Post by dahart »

joshspankit wrote: post #180
dahart wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can come at this from multiple directions. On the one hand, it’s wise to only expend effort making something faster up to a point. At some point, unless a human has to wait for the result, there is no reason to make something faster [1]. On the other hand, once something takes more than a minute or two, and the person who started it goes and does something else, it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as it’…

Excellent points, but I have two counters: - Feedback loops - Cumulative end-to-end latency The second is especially challenging as only a handful of coders saying “that’s good enough” can add up to perceptibly massive latency for the end user.

Oh I’d agree, the blog post about coffee was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. One shouldn’t presume it’s fast enough, one should always measure. And your points echo Abrash... if a human is waiting for the computer, then the computer could be made faster. That includes any and all human-computer interactions and workflows.

Recalling a bit more now, the actual point of the blog post I was thinking of, and not summarizing super accurately, was to try to make things faster to prevent the artists from getting out of their seat, precisely because the tool it was referring to was primarily a feedback loop interaction. The tool in question was the PDI lighting tool “Light”, which received an Academy award a few years back. https://www.oscars.org/sci-tech/ceremonies/2013

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#185

Post by CyberDildonics »

tayistay wrote: post #56
supernova87a wrote: post #53

I 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…

Illumination is global so each frame needs to be rendered separately AFAIK.

That doesn't make any sense. Each frame is rendered separately because you need the granularity of individual static images. It has nothing to do with global illumination.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#186

Post by xtracto »

naikrovek wrote: post #70
xtracto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was designed to have 280 characters max per message. This means that for this kind of long format text, the amount of Signal-to-Noise ratio of having a large number of "tweets" is pretty low. The amount of stuff your brain has to filter in the form of user name, user tweet handle, additional tagged handlers, UI menus, UI buttons for replying, retweeting, liking, etc on every single code snippet makes your bra…

You all are perfect delicate flowers that need things to be just right in order to use them, then? Is that what you're saying? Because that's what I'm getting from you.

Well... doing an analogy, I am sure you will be pissed if you went to a steak restaurant and your Prime Rib came with a spoon and a fork.

Sure, you /can/ cut your steak with a spoon and a fork but... it is just "painful" because those tools were not made for that. Would we think you are a delicate flower for asking for a knife? (or to make the analogy better, let's say you are at your friend's BBQ and he is giving you the steak for free).

I like twitter, and I use it of certain specific things for which a 200 character text is quite good at.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#187

Post by mkl »

naikrovek wrote: post #50
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

> Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies"

That doesn't work. Neither "read more" nor "show more replies" appears on the page [1]. Nor does "show replies", which turns out to be what you actually need to click once you go to a place it appears. In fact, there's no indication that there even are more replies, or that "replies" are actually the main content.

To see the content, it turns out you need to click on the original "1/" tweet, which takes you to what looks like a new page (but doesn't change the URL, so you can't link to it).

It is not usable in any real sense. I only spent the time to solve the puzzle as I was trying to make sense of your comment.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/BL9M74m (the centre column is shown in full, and there's nothing down further)

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#188

Post by klodolph »

capableweb wrote: post #145
klodolph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I'm not sure whether this is core-hours, machine-hours, or wall clock. And to be clear, when I say "wall clock", what I'm talking about is latency between when someone clicks "render" and when they see the final result. 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.

> It's not like you can just slice the frame into rectangles and farm them out. Funny thing, you sure can! Distributed rendering of single frames been a thing for a long time already.

What about GI? You can't just slice GI into pieces.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#189

Post by naikrovek »

mkl wrote: post #187
naikrovek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" That doesn't work. Neither "read more" nor "show more replies" appears on the page [1]. Nor does "show replies", which turns out to be what you actually need to click once you go to a place it appears. In fact, there's no indication that there even are more replies, or that "replies" are actually the main content. To see the content…

> It is not usable in any real sense.

Absolutely untrue. I can use it.

Again, (for about the 4th time) I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's usable.

I want everyone who is disagreeing with me to spend a SINGLE EFFING DAY with a para- or quadrapalegic and then tell me that TWITTER is unusable. What I'm trying to say is that "you have no idea what unusable really means."

You people are spoiled rotten and you not only don't know it, you actively object to anyone who says otherwise.

This site is filled with overinflated 20-somethings that think they know everything important and that their opinion actually has value.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#190

Post by userbinator »

buckminster wrote: post #115
3gg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript is not available. We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in this browser. Please enable JavaScript or switch to a supported browser to continue using twitter.com. You can see a list of supported browsers in our Help Center. So much for Pixar's render farm.

They changed this about a fortnight ago. Twitter worked without javascript previously.

A website needs to run arbitrary code on your machine and use a "supported" (i.e. approved and controlled by the megacorps) client, just to read short snippets of text.

That just about sums up the insanity of the "modern web".

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