Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 154 posts

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#121

Post by Arelius »

dahart wrote: post #64
Someone1234 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which Disney films use Unreal for final render? Disney has two separate path tracing renderers that are in active development and aren’t in danger of being replaced by Unreal. https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/ https://renderman.pixar.com/ 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…

Star Wars Rogue One had used Unreal for final render of a couple of shots. However it was more a proof-of-concept then a better worflow or anything.

Edit: I worked on this, Adding reference video from GDC https://youtu.be/pnigQTOig8k?t=510

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#122

Post by packetslave »

dahart wrote: post #64
Someone1234 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which Disney films use Unreal for final render? Disney has two separate path tracing renderers that are in active development and aren’t in danger of being replaced by Unreal. https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/ https://renderman.pixar.com/ 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…

The K-2S0 droid character in Rogue One (voiced by Alan Tudyk) was, in fact, rendered in real-time using Unreal, then composited into shots afterwards.

John Knoll from ILM gave a talk at GDC 2017 about it.

The catch, though, is that ILM took the Unreal Engine source code and modified it extensively in order to be able to render K-2S0 as he appeared in the film. It's not like they just downloaded it from the Epic Store and ran with it.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#123

Post by Arelius »

dagmx wrote: post #78
packetslave wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've definitely seen a TV or Movie that used Unreal. Name a major-studio movie that rendered final camera-ready VFX in Unreal. For TV, you can name The Mandalorian season one, sure, but even then, ILM switched The Volume to their own in-house real-time engine for season two.

DNeg did one sequence in the latest Matrix film. But it looked very obviously “real-time”. But yeah otherwise I agree with your points. The person you’re replying to is vastly over estimating unreal use for final CG. Definitely isn’t being primarily used for hero character work.

I mentioned it in another comment, but Star Wars Rogue One also used it for a few shots.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#124

Post by johnvanommen »

bhouston wrote: post #18
ykl wrote: post #4

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!

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.

I talked to some folks who worked there, years ago, and was surprised they didn't use GPUs. I got the impression that the software was largely based on code that dated back to the 1990s.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#125

Post by johnvanommen »

dimator wrote: post #10

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?

They were acquired in 2016:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/28/comcast-to-acquire-dreamwo...

Perhaps they've moved on to a new renderer.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#126

Post by [deleted] »

ur-whale wrote: post #103

So, I've finally managed to compile Moonray and play with it. TBH, this was really not as straightforward as it ought to have been: - some Optix-using code failed to compile against latest Optix SDK, code had to be patched. - the build instructions at [4] aren't completely foolproof either (don't quit the container before you manage to snapshot it, or else) When I finally got a clean compile, I tried to render a USD…

[deleted]

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#127

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

boywitharupee wrote: post #100

Can someone please explain the differences between real-time renderers and offline renderers? Do real-time renderers optimize frame by frame and focus on retaining some quality while prioritizing performance, using techniques like LOD and occlusion? Do offline renderers focus solely on quality? Are scene descriptions for both types of renderers different? What are the standard description files in games versus movies…

Like someone else said, real-time renders need to output at a reasonable frame-rate, which is the top priority. Therefore, per-frame image quality can take a fairly severe hit before things start being noticeable.

For the record, most real-time renderers are rasterisation-based, where geometry is assembled, rasterised, and then the fragments shaded. This is what almost all video games have been running on since the 1990s. Many so-called 'RTX' games you see today still do the bulk of their rendering using rasterisation and all the associated hacks to achieve photorealism, and only enable path-tracing for specular reflection, soft shadows, and diffuse-diffuse global illumination.

A high-quality real-time path-traced pipeline was impossible to achieve in playable framerates until very recently (~5 years ago). This is because we simply didn't have the hardware to do it, and denoising algorithms weren't very powerful until we got generative AI algorithms (OptiX, DLSS, etc). Even today, any real-time path-traced pipeline renders much fewer samples than any offline render does—usually 3 or 4 orders of magnitude less—simply because it would be too slow and a waste to render so many samples for a frame that would be displayed for several milliseconds and then promptly discarded.

Offline renderers do jack the quality up, and they use massive render-farms with hundreds of thousands of cores, with memory on the order of 10^14-10^15 bytes. The scales are completely off the charts; a single frame using an off-line renderer can take up to several hours to render on an average home computer.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#128

Post by [deleted] »

Arelius wrote: post #121
dahart wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Disney films use Unreal for final render? Disney has two separate path tracing renderers that are in active development and aren’t in danger of being replaced by Unreal. https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/ https://renderman.pixar.com/ 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…

Star Wars Rogue One had used Unreal for final render of a couple of shots. However it was more a proof-of-concept then a better worflow or anything. Edit: I worked on this, Adding reference video from GDC https://youtu.be/pnigQTOig8k?t=510

[deleted]

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#129

Post by Arelius »

sosodev wrote: post #43
jsheard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a monopoly within Disney, they acquired Pixar 17 years ago but Disney Animation Studios still develop their own Hyperion renderer completely independently of Pixar/Renderman.

Just because it's hard to migrate existing workflows or is there something that makes Hyperion superior?

Hyperion was designed to specifically take advantage of a specific ray batching architecture that's particularly good for out of core renderers. Which can be good for particularly large and complex scenes.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#130

Post by dagmx »

Arelius wrote: post #123
dagmx wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNeg did one sequence in the latest Matrix film. But it looked very obviously “real-time”. But yeah otherwise I agree with your points. The person you’re replying to is vastly over estimating unreal use for final CG. Definitely isn’t being primarily used for hero character work.

I mentioned it in another comment, but Star Wars Rogue One also used it for a few shots.

Ah yeah that’s the perfect kind of show for it. It was for K3-SO for certain shots iirc.
Post reply on HN