Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University • Hacker News Board

Re: Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University

#121

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, May 29, 2013, 10:33 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #58

aidenn0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must do them heavily in parallel then; otherwise it would take 170 years to render the movie.

Haha, yes, yes they do. You can see a few pictures of Pixar's render farm in [1]. According to [2] (which is where that 11.5 hours comes from) for Cars 2, they had 12,500 CPU cores for rendering. [1] http://www.slashfilm.com/cool-stuff-a-look-at-pixar-and-luca... [2] http://jalopnik.com/5813587/12500-cpu-cores-were-required-to...

well that still begs the question: "how many cores did they use per frame?" Did they just render 12500 frames in parallel?

Re: Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University

#122

Post by kibibu » Thu, May 30, 2013, 3:39 AM UTC

talmand wrote: post #120

kibibu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the clear description of local vs global illumination. This isn't quite what the article is discussing though. 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 int…

Wait a sec, I thought that customers were asking for ray tracing in RenderMan before then and they used the first Cars as a testbed for those capabilities.

Apologies, you're right.

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/RayTracingCars/paper.pdf

Re: Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University

#123

Post by winslow » Fri, May 31, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

davvid wrote: post #116

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #7

I was surprised that ray tracing in Pixar was historically a clunky, haphazard process. I always thought of it as this smooth, polished machine like something you would see at an Apple store. Life inside the sausage factory never quite looks like what outsiders would expect.

Most people probably think that Pixar uses Apple computers (e.g. the Apple references in Wall-E). In fact, Pixar is a Linux shop.

Dreamworks is also Linux based (RedHat).