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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#231

Post by boulos »

dahart wrote: post #117
berkut wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the expense is not really worth it - even GPU rendering (while around 3/4 x faster than CPU rendering) is memory constrained compared to CPU rendering, and as soon as you try and go out-of-core on the GPU, you're back at CPU speeds, so there's usually no point doing GPU rendering for entire scenes (which can take > 48 GB of RAM for all geometry, accel structures, textures, etc) given the often large memory re…

> Because the expense is not really worth it I disagree with this takeaway. But full disclosure I’m biased: I work on OptiX. There is a reason Pixar and Arnold and Vray and most other major industry renderers are moving to the GPU, because the trends are clear and because it has recently become ‘worth it’. Many renderers are reporting factors of 2-10 for production scale scene rendering. (Here’s a good example: https…

Dave, doesn’t that video show more like “50% faster”? Here’s the timecode (&t=360) [1] for the “production difficulty” result (which really doesn’t seem to be, but whatever).

Isn’t there a better Vray or Arnold comparison somewhere?

As in my summary comment, an A100 can now run real scenes, but will cost you ~$10k per card. For $10k, you get a lot more threads from AMD.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlmRuR5MKmU&t=360

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#232

Post by boulos »

berkut wrote: post #157
dahart wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to write a production renderer for a living, now I work with a lot of people who write production renderers for both CPU and GPU. I’m not sure what line you’re drawing exactly ... if you mean that it will take 3 or 4 years before the industry will be able to stop using CPUs for production rendering, then I totally agree with you. If you mean that it will take 3 or 4 years before industry can use GPUs for any p…

The line I'm drawing is high-end VFX / CG is still IMO years away from using GPUs for final frame (with loads of AOVs and Deep output) rendering. Are GPUs starting to be used at earlier points in the pipeline? Yes, absolutely, but they always were to a degree in previs and modelling (via rasterisation). They are gradually becoming more useable at more steps in pipelines, but they're not there yet for high-end studios…

I think you’re right about the current state (not quite there, especially in raw $$s), but the potential is finally good enough that folks are investing seriously on the software side.

The folks at Framestore and many other shops already don’t do more than XX GiB per frame for their rendering. So for me, this comes down to “can we finally implement a good enough texture cache in optix/the community” which I understand Mark Leone is working on :).

The shader thing seems easy enough. I’m not worried about an OSL compiled output running worse than the C-side. Divergence is a real issue, but so many studios are now using just a handful of BSDFs with lots of textures to drive, that as long as you don’t force the shading to be “per object group” but instead “per shader, varying inputs is fine”, you’ll still get high utilization.

The 80 GiB parts will make it so that some shops could go fully in-core. I expect we’ll see that sooner than you’d think, just because people will start doing interactive work, never want to give it up, and then say “make that but better” for the finals.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#233

Post by CamJN »

jlgaddis wrote: post #229
mschuster91 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proper support in the UI for RTs with comments. But honestly I'd prefer if they spent some fucking time upstaffing their user service and abuse teams. And if they could finally ban Trump and his conspiracy nutcase followers/network.

If the very light gray color of your comment is any indication, folks here didn't like what you said. I certainly don't think that HN should ban you because of it, though.

[flagged]

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#234

Post by dagmx »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #222
aprdm wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere I worked has been traditional NFS, and I've seen more than 3 times the figure you quoted working well. Usually you have different mountpoints/vfs`s in different servers for different kinds of files.

Interesting, maybe the scientific computations we are doing are more I/O intense than render applications? How do studios manage disaster recovery? What happens when a multi petabyte NFS server keels over? Are there tape drive backups? It seems risky to have a such a critical system serviced by only a single node.

They're serviced by multiple nodes and have very strong backup policies.

At rhythm and Hues, you could request footage all the way back from the founding of the studio for example.

CG work is fairly IO intensive for tasks like rendering where you're reading hundreds or even thousands of geometry caches per frame. But for other things, your IO isn't as frequent since it's not about constant r/w as there are long computational or artist time between saves and reads.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#235

Post by dagmx »

nikon wrote: post #228
banana_giraffe wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little bit on Disney+, one of the extras called "Soul, Improvised". It's very much not technical, more focused on the emotional impact of WFH.

Thanks! I just checked it out. So interesting they use Linux for non-developer staff!

Most of the big animation and visual effects studios are Linux based.

We even have a reference platform spec for some kind of industry wide baseline: https://vfxplatform.com/

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#236

Post by dagmx »

solinent wrote: post #176
klodolph wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, this was never the case, and not even close. Toy Story took a ton of compute power to render (at the time), Soul took a ton of compute power to render (at the time).

They render them at a very high resolution, so perhaps the person I heard the rumors from was talking about reducing the resolution to something less than 10k by 10k (or more sometimes, I've been out of the film industry for 8 years). I shouldn't really say more.

I'm not sure there are feature films rendered at 10k. At least I can't think of a single studio or project that's that high for anything other than marketing or special projects

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#237

Post by mroche »

quelsolaar wrote: post #208
klodolph wrote: post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

In computer graphics its known as Blinn’s Law, It states that no matter how fast hardware you get, artists put more details in to shots and therefore render times remain roughly the same. Its been roughly true for 30ish years.

And it hurts. But man are the images gorgeous!

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#238

Post by mroche »

jfindley wrote: post #214
mroche wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire studio is VDI based (except for the Mac stations, unsure about Windows), utilizing the Teradici PCoIP protocol, 10Zig zero-clients, and (at the time, not sure if they've started testing the graphical agent), Teradici host cards for the workstations. I was an intern in Pixar systems for 2019 (at Blue Sky now), and we're also using a mix of PCoIP and NoMachine for home users. We finally figured out a quirk w…

Few years ago I spoke to some ILM people about their VDI setup, which at the time was cobbled together out of mesos and a bunch of xorg hacks to get VDI server scheduling working on a pool of remote machines with GPUs (I think they might even have used AWS intially but not sure - this is going back a fair few years now). I was doing a lot of work with mesos at the time, and we chatted a bit about this as our work ove…

I wish I could answer this, but I really can't. Not because of any NDA, just that I don't know. I wasn't involved with the workstation team at Pixar (or ILM at all); I was part of the Network and Server Admin [NSA] team, specifically focused on OpenShift. There are a lot of tools that Pixar use that I don't have the full picture of how they work together.

Here at Blue Sky we are in our infancy for thin client based work. Remote terminals aren't too new as they were used for contract workers and artists who needed to WFH on the prior show, but we don't have VDI as we still use deskside workstations. For COVID, the workstations have been retrofitted with Teradici remote workstation hostcards and we send the artists home with a VPN client and zero client, utilizing direct connect. It was enough to get us going, but we have a long road ahead in optimizing this stack and eventually (if our datacenters can handle it) switching over to VDI.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#239

Post by naikrovek »

jgwil2 wrote: post #200
naikrovek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not usable in any real sense. Absolutely untrue. I can use it. Again, (for about the 4th time) I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's usable. I want everyone who is disagreeing with me to spend a SINGLE EFFING DAY with a para- or quadrapalegic and then tell me that TWITTER is unusable. What I'm trying to say is that "you have no idea what unusable really means." You people are spoiled rotten and you not on…

So because there are people in wheelchairs nobody can complain about a suboptimal user experience on a popular website with hundreds of engineers making copious amounts of money?

> So because there are people in wheelchairs nobody can complain about a suboptimal user experience on a popular website with hundreds of engineers making copious amounts of money?

That's not what I'm saying. Not even close. However, if you knew even a small number of the usability issues that certain people are forced to put up with every day of their lives, you'd cease viewing twitter UX as a problem worth even acknowledging.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#240

Post by naikrovek »

egypturnash wrote: post #215
naikrovek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to me that people find twitter difficult to read... I mean it's not perfect but it's not an ovaltine decoder ring, either. Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" You're human; THE most adaptable creature known. Adapt! I'm not saying that twitter UX is perfect, or even good. I AM saying that it is usable.

Dude I use Twitter regularly and this thread was super annoying, it just showed me two of the actual tweets that are supposed to be interesting here even after I clicked on “more”.

Dude I use twitter regularly and I navigated the thread easily.
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