21–30 of 123 posts
From what I gathered from John Carmack, ray tracing is done much more efficiently with voxels than with triangles, so hopefully this will push game engine companies to incorporate voxels sooner into their engines, too.
Pixar probably didn't need to do a voxel -> triangle transformation to their data set if they were using voxels, but any real-time renderer does.
From what I gathered from John Carmack, ray tracing is done much more efficiently with voxels than with triangles, so hopefully this will push game engine companies to incorporate voxels sooner into their engines, too.
There are a lot of very nice mathematical properties of triangles, and the trend towards graphical fidelity has really only served to balloon budgets in the gaming space. We don't need voxels, and honestly neither do we need ray tracing.
It's not even new tech--games going back to Outcast, some Build engine games, Novalogic stuff, and so on have used voxels. Ray tracing has been used in a handful of nifty tech demos, but otherwise nobody cares.
Ray tracing and voxel tech is of marginal utility for games, and things have moved on--it'd be like switching the US construction industry over to metric; too late to make a difference and too minor to matter.
EDIT: In spite of all this, voxel cone tracing looks sexy as hell though.
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.
They went through a phase of hiring hip young things fresh out of MIT to write tools. Instead of nice friendly tools that play well together, they got a lot of domain specific languages.
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...
Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results. If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?
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...
Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results. If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?
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...
Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results. If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?
What sort of raytracing are they using? Are they going all the way to an unbiased global light transport algorithm (like LuxRender) or just using basic raytracing (like PovRay)? Are they using an existing renderer? If not, are they releasing their own like they did with RenderMan? Are they rendering with CPUs or with GPUs? How much time per frame does it take them with how many cores of what sort?
Our entire function in the filmmaking business is to tell a story visually, and for that you need complete control and directability of the image. This is the opposite goal of unbiased renderers. Nevertheless more tools in the tool box is always good.
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...
Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results. If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?
I think it does, because the tech stack in the background allows for things that might not be possible for other tech stacks.
You can duplicate somebody else's webapp in your backend of choice, but you can't have true GI if your rendering engine doesn't support it, and while you can fake some of the effects, they ultimately won't look as good as the real thing (unless you're aiming for a different 'good').
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...
Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results. If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?
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.
I think it's awesome how they thought something was too hard, and so they faked it to be "good enough." I'm going to have to look more critically at Pixar movies now, knowing that the old ones didn't have actual calculated light sources.
Nevertheless we often faked that with massive light counts. For the opening shot of Armageddon with the astroid hitting earth I used 20,000 point lights to represent secondary debris reentering the atmosphere. In 1998 or when ever that was it still only took RenderMan a few minutes to render each frame.