11–20 of 27 posts
Quote: Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the background with another. I saw that, and my brain hated it. I even tweeted about what I thought it was at the time. This is an absolutely terrible effed, and I don't understand why they do it.
Clicked thinking it was a Disney adaptation of the novel with the same name. In retrospect, it would be an unlikely adaptation for Disney to undertake ;)
Hyperion wouldn't be that much out of character for them, even if personally "Hyperion, from the producers behind Pearl Harbor and The Avengers" isn't at tag line I'd particularly look forward to.
Brent and the team at Disney Feature Animation have always pushed complexity like crazy. Most people keep telling them to just think procedurally or reuse elements, but Brent prefers to let the artists do whatever they want and the system should handle it. Since cores are cheaper than humans this is a good long-term tradeoff, but YMMV since very few studios would bother doing so much explicit detail (as opposed to pr…
In the past we would have used a matte painting for distant background stuff. It's pretty sweet.
Brent and the team at Disney Feature Animation have always pushed complexity like crazy. Most people keep telling them to just think procedurally or reuse elements, but Brent prefers to let the artists do whatever they want and the system should handle it. Since cores are cheaper than humans this is a good long-term tradeoff, but YMMV since very few studios would bother doing so much explicit detail (as opposed to pr…
I don't want to be a sourpuss, but there is a limit beyond which MPI stops scaling, when you look at the program runtime 60% of time is spent in MPI_Wait. Past 80k nodes you can't go much faster no matter how much money you got, I believe this is precisely the problem they address by intelligently grouping similar rays.
Quote: Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the background with another. I saw that, and my brain hated it. I even tweeted about what I thought it was at the time. This is an absolutely terrible effed, and I don't understand why they do it.
"Since a hero character close to camera felt attractive with a stereo convergence, that would mean the background in the same shot would be too extreme and unpleasing on the eye. Instead of dialing down the stereo effect overall, Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the background with another. Thus the foreground character would appear round and with more fullness, but their background would appear more relaxed, less stereo pronounced."
Brent and the team at Disney Feature Animation have always pushed complexity like crazy. Most people keep telling them to just think procedurally or reuse elements, but Brent prefers to let the artists do whatever they want and the system should handle it. Since cores are cheaper than humans this is a good long-term tradeoff, but YMMV since very few studios would bother doing so much explicit detail (as opposed to pr…
>> Since cores are cheaper than humans I don't want to be a sourpuss, but there is a limit beyond which MPI stops scaling, when you look at the program runtime 60% of time is spent in MPI_Wait. Past 80k nodes you can't go much faster no matter how much money you got, I believe this is precisely the problem they address by intelligently grouping similar rays.
Whenever I read about new renderers I think I'm completely intellectually inept even with what I think is a reasonably well-rounded computer science education. It is like reading about string theory in a way. Sure, I can grasp the concepts, but the details and minutia are fascinating and admittedly a little beyond my immediate comprehension. I remember when POV-RAY was amazing when it ran all night to produce just on…
1. http://www.amazon.com/Physically-Based-Rendering-Second-Edit...
Whenever I read about new renderers I think I'm completely intellectually inept even with what I think is a reasonably well-rounded computer science education. It is like reading about string theory in a way. Sure, I can grasp the concepts, but the details and minutia are fascinating and admittedly a little beyond my immediate comprehension. I remember when POV-RAY was amazing when it ran all night to produce just on…
I suggest taking a look at Physically Based Rendering [1]. It goes through an advanced rendering system in a literate coding style. That is, the physical explanations are interspersed with the code of an open source renderer [2]. I'm not sure how it compares with this Disney renderer, but it should go a long way towards demystifying how these things work. 1. http://www.amazon.com/Physically-Based-Rendering-Second-Edi…
Some of the knowledge is not-quite state of the art any more, but everything's still relevant. And there's a third edition coming soon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Since cores are cheaper than humans I don't want to be a sourpuss, but there is a limit beyond which MPI stops scaling, when you look at the program runtime 60% of time is spent in MPI_Wait. Past 80k nodes you can't go much faster no matter how much money you got, I believe this is precisely the problem they address by intelligently grouping similar rays.
You forget that rendering a movie is almost infinitely scalable. Imagine, even when using only single-threaded code, you could scale for 130,000 nodes as there are about this many frames in a 90 minute movie at 24 fps. This is not totally true of course, for example you might want to do light or particle system calculation which persist across frames, but the general rendering bit is extremely scalable.
Quote: Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the background with another. I saw that, and my brain hated it. I even tweeted about what I thought it was at the time. This is an absolutely terrible effed, and I don't understand why they do it.
The article explains why they do it. "Since a hero character close to camera felt attractive with a stereo convergence, that would mean the background in the same shot would be too extreme and unpleasing on the eye. Instead of dialing down the stereo effect overall, Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the background wit…
1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252F...