61–70 of 154 posts
i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?
At this point every studio has their own renderer, Pixar has RenderMan, Illumination has one from MacGuff, Disney has their Hyperion, and Animal Logic has Glimpse.
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> If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal Why do you think this? Nobody in film or vfx is using Unreal for final rendering, Unreal is built for games not offline path tracing.
Tons of studios are now using Unreal for final rendering, including Disney and several blockbuster movies. The fantastic thing about Unreal is that you can do realtime rendering on-set (e.g. for directorial choices/actor feedback) and then post-production upscale it with the ceiling only being cost. Unreal in the TV/Movie industry is already huge and only getting bigger, year-on-year. You've definitely seen a TV or M…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal Why do you think this? Nobody in film or vfx is using Unreal for final rendering, Unreal is built for games not offline path tracing.
Tons of studios are now using Unreal for final rendering, including Disney and several blockbuster movies. The fantastic thing about Unreal is that you can do realtime rendering on-set (e.g. for directorial choices/actor feedback) and then post-production upscale it with the ceiling only being cost. Unreal in the TV/Movie industry is already huge and only getting bigger, year-on-year. You've definitely seen a TV or M…
https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/
These renderers are comparable in use case & audience to MoonRay, which is why I don’t think you’re correct that MoonRay needs external contribution to survive.
“Used unreal” for on-set rendering is hand-wavy and not what you claimed. Final render is the goal post.
For anyone that is curious, this is the paper that describes the core vectorized path tracing architecture in Moonray: http://www.tabellion.org/et/paper17/MoonRay.pdf Extracting sufficient coherency from path tracing in order to be able to get good SIMD utilization is a surprisingly difficult problem that much research effort has been poured into, and Moonray has a really interesting solution!
This paper is the first place I've found a production use of Knights' Landing / Xeon Phi, the Intel massively-multicore Atom-with-AVX512 accelerator system, outside of HPC / science use cases. And for this use case, it makes perfect sense!
It feels like intel kinda hates AVX512 on the cpu side (or wants to upsell you for it) so I’m wondering if they turned those cards into their GPUs
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I have no experience with moonray, but it being a render, the answer would be.. No. The renderer is only one piece of the entire animated movie production pipeline. Modeling -> Texturing ~ rigging /Animation -> post processing effects -> rendering - > video editing That's a simplified view of the visual part of producing a short or long cgi film It is a lot of knowledge to aquire so a production team is likely made o…
> Modeling -> Texturing ~ rigging /Animation -> post processing effects -> rendering - > video editing In animation (and VFX), editing comes at the beginning. Throwing away frames (and all the work done to create them) is simply too expensive. Handles (the extra frames at the beginning and start of a shot) are usually very small. I'd say Also modeling & texturing and animation usually happen in parallel. Later, anima…
For anyone that is curious, this is the paper that describes the core vectorized path tracing architecture in Moonray: http://www.tabellion.org/et/paper17/MoonRay.pdf Extracting sufficient coherency from path tracing in order to be able to get good SIMD utilization is a surprisingly difficult problem that much research effort has been poured into, and Moonray has a really interesting solution!
This paper is the first place I've found a production use of Knights' Landing / Xeon Phi, the Intel massively-multicore Atom-with-AVX512 accelerator system, outside of HPC / science use cases. And for this use case, it makes perfect sense!
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Is there any comparisons to GPU-accelerated rendering? It seems most people are going that direction rather than trying to optimize for CPUs these days, especially via AVX instructions.
CPUs are still king at the scale Dreamworks/Pixar/etc operate at, GPUs are faster up to a point but they hit a wall in extremely large and complex scenes. They just don't have enough VRAM, or the work is too divergent and batches too small to keep all the threads busy. In recent years the high-end renderers (including MoonRay) have started supporting GPU rendering alongside their traditional CPU modes, but the GPU mo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal Why do you think this? Nobody in film or vfx is using Unreal for final rendering, Unreal is built for games not offline path tracing.
Tons of studios are now using Unreal for final rendering, including Disney and several blockbuster movies. The fantastic thing about Unreal is that you can do realtime rendering on-set (e.g. for directorial choices/actor feedback) and then post-production upscale it with the ceiling only being cost. Unreal in the TV/Movie industry is already huge and only getting bigger, year-on-year. You've definitely seen a TV or M…
i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?
The renderer is an important of the VFX toolkit, but there are more than a few production-quality renderers out there, some of them are even FOSS. A studio or film's competitive advantage is more around storytelling and art design.