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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#311

Post by CyberDildonics »

aprdm wrote: post #310
CyberDildonics wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some day I'll know what I'm talking about. Which part specifically do think is wrong?

Focusing on the technical steps and what might be technically feasible or not versus the existing world and artists workflows. Also speaking as an authority that knows best patronizing who actually works in the industry.

> Focusing on the technical steps and what might be technically feasible or not versus the existing world and artists workflows.

I would say it's the opposite. There is nothing necessary about 10,000 4k maps and definitely nothing typical. Workflows trade a certain amount of optimization for consistency, but not like this.

> patronizing who actually works in the industry.

I don't think I was patronizing. This person is valuable in that they are trying to make completely excessive situations work. Telling people (or demonstrating to them) they are being ridiculous is not his responsibility and is a tight rope to walk in his position.

> Also speaking as an authority that knows best

If I said that 2 + 2 = 4 would you ask about a math degree? This is an exercise in appeal to authority. This person and myself aren't even contradicting each other very much.

He is saying the extremes that he has seen, I'm saying that 10,000 pixels of texture data for each pixel in a frame is enormous excess.

The only contradiction is that he seems to think that because someone did it, it must be a neccesity.

Instead of confronting what I'm actually saying, you are trying to rationalize why you don't need to.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#312

Post by aprdm »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #311
aprdm wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focusing on the technical steps and what might be technically feasible or not versus the existing world and artists workflows. Also speaking as an authority that knows best patronizing who actually works in the industry.

> Focusing on the technical steps and what might be technically feasible or not versus the existing world and artists workflows. I would say it's the opposite. There is nothing necessary about 10,000 4k maps and definitely nothing typical. Workflows trade a certain amount of optimization for consistency, but not like this. > patronizing who actually works in the industry. I don't think I was patronizing. This person…

> This person is valuable in that they are trying to make completely excessive situations work. Telling people (or demonstrating to them) they are being ridiculous is not his responsibility and is a tight rope to walk in his position.

Usually the way VFX works is that technology (R&D) is very moved away from production. The artist job is getting the shot done regardless of technology and they have very short deadlines. They usually push the limits.

Digital artists are not very tech savvy in a lot of disciplines, it is not feasible to have a TD in the delivery deadlines of the shots for a show.

The person at Weta also told you how Weta actually worked in Kong which is very typical. You don't know upfront what you need. And you dismissed it as something unnecessary, still, is how every big VFX studio works. Do you feel that you know better and/or everyone is doing something wrong and hasn't really thought about it? If that is the case you might have a business opportunity for a more efficient VFX studio!

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#313

Post by Arelius »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #40

Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?

Honestly? Because they have a big legacy in CPU code, and because of mostly political reasons they haven't invested in making their GPU (Realtime preview) renderer production ready till very recently. There are some serious technical challenges to solve, and not having GPUs with tons of ram among them, but the investment to solve them hasn't really been there yet.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#314

Post by CyberDildonics »

aprdm wrote: post #312
CyberDildonics wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Focusing on the technical steps and what might be technically feasible or not versus the existing world and artists workflows. I would say it's the opposite. There is nothing necessary about 10,000 4k maps and definitely nothing typical. Workflows trade a certain amount of optimization for consistency, but not like this. > patronizing who actually works in the industry. I don't think I was patronizing. This person…

> This person is valuable in that they are trying to make completely excessive situations work. Telling people (or demonstrating to them) they are being ridiculous is not his responsibility and is a tight rope to walk in his position. Usually the way VFX works is that technology (R&D) is very moved away from production. The artist job is getting the shot done regardless of technology and they have very short deadline…

Your post is an actual example of being patronizing. Before I was just trying to explain what the person I replied to probably already knew intuitively.

> how Weta actually worked in Kong which is very typical

It is not typical to have 10,000 4k maps on a creature. What has been typical when rendering at 2k is a set of 2k maps for face, torso, arms and legs. Maybe a single arm and leg can be painted and the UVs can be mirrored, though mostly texture painters will layout the UVs separately and duplicate the texture themselves to leave room for variations.

> it is not feasible to have a TD in the delivery deadlines of the shots for a show.

Actually most of the people working on shots are considered TDs. Specific asset work for some sequence with a hero asset is actually very common, which makes sense if you think about it from a story point of view of needing a visual change to communicate a change of circumstances.

4k rendering (was the 2017 king kong rendered in 4k?) and all the closeups of king kong mean that higher resolution maps and more granular sections are understandable, but it doesn't add up to going from 16 2k maps to 10,000 4k maps. Maps like diffuse, specular and subsurface albedo are also just multiplicative, so there is no reason to have multiple maps unless they need to be rebalanced against each other per shot (such as for variations).

You still never actually explained a problem or inconsistency with anything I've said.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#315

Post by aprdm »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #314
aprdm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This person is valuable in that they are trying to make completely excessive situations work. Telling people (or demonstrating to them) they are being ridiculous is not his responsibility and is a tight rope to walk in his position. Usually the way VFX works is that technology (R&D) is very moved away from production. The artist job is getting the shot done regardless of technology and they have very short deadline…

Your post is an actual example of being patronizing. Before I was just trying to explain what the person I replied to probably already knew intuitively. > how Weta actually worked in Kong which is very typical It is not typical to have 10,000 4k maps on a creature. What has been typical when rendering at 2k is a set of 2k maps for face, torso, arms and legs. Maybe a single arm and leg can be painted and the UVs can b…

I do not think you said anything wrong, is much less about what you're saying and more about how you're saying (as if it was a simple thing to get right and people are dumb for not doing it in an optimal way).

> Actually most of the people working on shots are considered TDs.

That's not true in the studios I've been. TDs is usually reserved to more close to pipeline folks that aren't doing shot work (as in, delivering shots). They're supporting folks doing so.

For the record, I haven't downvoted you at all.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#316

Post by forelle2 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #314
aprdm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This person is valuable in that they are trying to make completely excessive situations work. Telling people (or demonstrating to them) they are being ridiculous is not his responsibility and is a tight rope to walk in his position. Usually the way VFX works is that technology (R&D) is very moved away from production. The artist job is getting the shot done regardless of technology and they have very short deadline…

Your post is an actual example of being patronizing. Before I was just trying to explain what the person I replied to probably already knew intuitively. > how Weta actually worked in Kong which is very typical It is not typical to have 10,000 4k maps on a creature. What has been typical when rendering at 2k is a set of 2k maps for face, torso, arms and legs. Maybe a single arm and leg can be painted and the UVs can b…

An interesting exercise might be working out a texture budget for this asset.

https://youtu.be/PBhCE97ZN98

This was created with the requirement that the director be able to use it at will. Closeups. Set replacements, destruction, the works.

You don’t have a shot breakdown or camera list.

You’ve got 6 months of pre production to support 1000 shots. Once in production you will be the only texture artist supporting 30 TDS.

How do you spend your 6 months to make sure production runs smoothly?

I’m kinda interested in your experience of this stuff as the numbers you’re quoting for 2k work are, in my experience, waaaaaay off and are closer to how a high end games asset would currently be textured.

I don’t disagree with you that the numbers involved are crazy when taken in isolation but it is (or at least was 5 years ago) a very common workflow at ILM, Weta, Dneg, DD, R&H Framestore etc etc. The quoted high numbers are the very upper end but many thousands of assets on hundreds of productions have been textured at what I believe you would consider “insane” detail levels.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#317

Post by forelle2 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #314
aprdm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This person is valuable in that they are trying to make completely excessive situations work. Telling people (or demonstrating to them) they are being ridiculous is not his responsibility and is a tight rope to walk in his position. Usually the way VFX works is that technology (R&D) is very moved away from production. The artist job is getting the shot done regardless of technology and they have very short deadline…

Your post is an actual example of being patronizing. Before I was just trying to explain what the person I replied to probably already knew intuitively. > how Weta actually worked in Kong which is very typical It is not typical to have 10,000 4k maps on a creature. What has been typical when rendering at 2k is a set of 2k maps for face, torso, arms and legs. Maybe a single arm and leg can be painted and the UVs can b…

If you’ve worked in high end production I would love to work at your facility.

You clearly understand many of the issues involved but downplay the complexity in running high end assets in less than perfect production.

Unless the industry has changed dramatically in 5 years shot changes, per shot fixes, variants (clean, dirty, destroyed), shader tweaks, happen on every single show I’ve ever been part of.

Render time and storage is one factor as is individual artist iteration, but the real productivity killer is an inter discipline iteration.

Going from a “blurry texture” note in comp to a TD fix to a texture “upres” is potentially a 5 person, 4 day turn around. I would trade a whole bunch of cpu and storage to avoid that.

Computers are cheap, people are expensive, people coordinating even more so.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#318

Post by JustinGarrison »

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 worked at WDAS and remember talking to the ILM team testing out the mesos VDI stuff. AFAIK it never left the POC stage but it was a really neat demo.

My team at WDAS mirrored pretty closely what Pixar did with VDI although we didn't fully switch to it for different reasons (power and heat constraints in the datacenter and price). IIRC the VDI hosts had static VMs and the teradici connection manager did all the smarts of routing user requests to a VM. There was no dynamic orchestration for us because we only had 60ish users using full VDI VMs, but even our plans of hundreds of users was still to use teradici and standard VMs on each host.

We rendered different than Pixar which also made our system a bit more static. We didn't have a separate render VM and instead rendered directly on the workstation VM when users were idle or disconnected.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#319

Post by JustinGarrison »

aprdm wrote: post #209
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing Pixar is using a distributed file system opposed to traditional NFS? Do you have any idea what storage system render farms tend to use? At my workplace we have a smallish HPC center and ended up moving off of NFS at about 2PB of storage since we were starting to hit the limits of NFS (think 1TB of RAM and 88 cores on a single NFS server).

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.

Same here. I had some passing information from Pixar, WDAS, and ILM and they were pretty much all NFS. Lots of NFS caching (avere) and high performance NFS appliances in use.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#320

Post by JustinGarrison »

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!

I worked at Disney Animation on the Linux engineering team for a few years. The flexibility of Linux was a key enabler for us being able to produce movies the way we did. Artists overall seemed to love the power of the Linux desktop setup we provided.
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