81–90 of 123 posts
sigh WHY has he locked the font size down on his blog such that CMD + and - only change the text area width and image sizes?
It works just fine in Chrome and Firefox here. Are you perhaps using an old and/or awful browser? He's using a px unit on his font size, but Firefox and Chrome have done full-page scaling for ages now.
For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…
In any case, running global illumination often causes a major increase in rendering time. So it's understandable that Pixar, which has to render a huge number of frames at huge resolutions, did not traditionally use it much. There's also another factor at play, which is directability. Physical correctness is not usually a priority except as far as it advances the artistic goals of the people making the movie. If the…
Less flexible, more scripted behavior is often the smarter choice when you want to be able to ensure a certain gameplay experience.
I would love them to re-generate Brave with ray tracing, I'm guessing though that would take too many resources even for a blue-ray edition.
I think the worst part is the amount of man-hours it would take, not compute hours (but maybe that's what you meant?). If the change is as deep as it sounds like, the entire tooling support changed, so all scenes would have to be re-lit by artists, not-entirely-from-scratch but worse than you think. REYES-rendered scenes that fake global illumination are pretty arcanely hacked together. Just making a legacy scene ray…
For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…
Pixar have had a global illumination system in place at least since Up, and maybe earlier [1]. However, it was one that integrated with their rasterizer.
The article is now claiming that Pixar have switched to Raytracing exclusively, which really is actually a HUGE change, as Renderman only introduced raytracing at all with Cars 2. Every prior Pixar movie exclusively used a micropolygon rasterizer for rendering.
The article also claims:
> ray tracing is a relatively advanced CG lighting technique
Well, not really. Ray tracing - at least Whitted-style ray tracing - is about as simple as physically-based rendering gets. It's making it fast that gets complex, but it's possible to write a basic ray tracer in a few hours if you know what you're doing.
[1] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedGlobalIlluminati...
This is wrong actually - they've been using ray tracing for ages (all ambient occlusion in PRMan is done with raytracing, by sending out occlusion rays in a hemisphere around the shading point). What's new with MU is they're using both physically-plausible shading (where the shading is based off physically-based BRDF lighting algorithms, which gives much more realistic results), and global illumination path-tracing f…
I don't know if they still use the REYES rasterizer; maybe some hybrid solution like Mantra or Modo.
For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…
In any case, running global illumination often causes a major increase in rendering time. So it's understandable that Pixar, which has to render a huge number of frames at huge resolutions, did not traditionally use it much. There's also another factor at play, which is directability. Physical correctness is not usually a priority except as far as it advances the artistic goals of the people making the movie. If the…
We used GI at pixar when it was appropriate, even at the expense of long render times - that is to say, only when it made the final product look better. How you get to the result doesn't matter, only what it looks like on screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They must do them heavily in parallel then; otherwise it would take 170 years to render the movie.
based on the two numbers: 170 years and 11.5 hours, that means 129581.580089 tasks in parallel over 11.5 hours
Anybody knows how other companies like universal's animation department (ice age, despicable me, ...) stand technology-wise? From the visuals, i always assumed pixar is setting the standards but now knowing that they just start to use unified raytracing, the gap might not be that big...
Tintin was raytraced from what I understand, using PentaRay (Weta's own raytracer.)
Pixar waiting this long to incorporate more raytracing probably has little to do with their abilities and more to do with historical reasons. Renderman traditionally did stuff a certain way and it has worked great so far for them. There's algorithms invented by Pixar people in most 3D-apps, so their technological contribution has been huge.
In the end, how you achieve the result is not important. Only the visual results. VFX & animation is all smoke and mirrors :)
For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…