Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University

thisanimatedlife.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

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

#91

Post by wtracy »

primigenus wrote: post #90
jarrett wrote: post #31

For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…

I wonder what would happen if you offloaded the rendering of a movie like Monsters University to something like Google Compute Engine. Would it cost an arm and a leg? Or would it solve a lot of scaling/cost/time challenges?

The cost would be completely prohibitive. Pixar is at the point where they have to micromanage the electricity cost of their rendering clusters. (At one point they did a multimillion dollar hardware upgrade on the grounds that they would actually save money thanks to new hardware being more power efficient.)

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

#92

Post by sampo »

jarrett wrote: post #31

For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…

Here's a nice refresher, "Global Illumination in a Nutshell": http://www.thepolygoners.com/tutorials/GIIntro/GIIntro.htm

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

#93

Post by IanChiles »

criley wrote: post #32
angersock wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let's add voxels!!!111one" is one of the most irritating refrains of gamers. 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 o…

Why do people assume that voxels and polygons don't play well together? There are voxel engines now that store world data using voxels while what the player actually sees is polygons based on that voxel data. I'm reminded of one guy's side project[1] that accomplishes exactly that. [1] http://procworld.blogspot.com/2012/12/videos-of-caves-and-bu...

There's an awesome library that goes by the name of Polyvox that does exactly this. It's worth a look if you're interested in voxel-y things.

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

#94

Post by barrkel »

munificent wrote: post #82
luchak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any case, running global illumination often causes a major increase in rendering time. So it's understandable that Pixar, which has to render a huge number of frames at huge resolutions, did not traditionally use it much. There's also another factor at play, which is directability. Physical correctness is not usually a priority except as far as it advances the artistic goals of the people making the movie. If the…

For an interesting parallel, this is analogous to my experience with emergent gameplay when I was in the game industry. Everyone really likes the idea of emergent gameplay and the open-ended-ness and flexibility that gives you. But you sacrifice a lot of control when you go that way. This can leave game designers and producers feeling like their hands are tied when the game doesn't play the way they want. Less flexib…

And less flexible, more scripted behaviour is one of the biggest things driving me away from gaming these days. Most seem to end up as a sequence of action bubbles punctuated by cut-scenes, often with super-heavy hints about the "correct" way to handle the situation - sometimes even unwinnable (through e.g. infinitely spawning enemies) until you do things the "right" way.

And the resulting primary gameplay experience is boredom; felt most heavily recently with Bioshock Infinite.

The other type of game is the open world formula, featured in Assassin's Creed and GTA, and to a certain extent Fallout, Skyrim etc. But these become boring in another way; they rely on making navigating the territory interesting, but eventually the novelty wears off and you just want to enable the "instant teleport" function.

I still miss games like Thief, where navigating the territory was the main challenge of the game, but the territory was carefully enough designed, yet still very open, and not seen repeatedly enough to become boring. Dishonored came within 60%, but the player character was too powerful.

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

#95

Post by wtracy »

asperous wrote: post #48

Now that Pixar is only ray tracing, can real time move to scanline? I'd really like to see a lot more smooth shapes and complicated geometry in games if possible.

That's pretty much what games already use. The only difference is polygon count--doubling the polygons tends to halve the framerate.

That said, of the magic comes from a toolchain that lets artists work with curved surfaces (NURBS or similar) and that converts those surfaces to polygons at the last minute. We finally started getting hardware support for that sort of thing with DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.

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

#96

Post by katbyte »

barrkel wrote: post #94
munificent wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an interesting parallel, this is analogous to my experience with emergent gameplay when I was in the game industry. Everyone really likes the idea of emergent gameplay and the open-ended-ness and flexibility that gives you. But you sacrifice a lot of control when you go that way. This can leave game designers and producers feeling like their hands are tied when the game doesn't play the way they want. Less flexib…

And less flexible, more scripted behaviour is one of the biggest things driving me away from gaming these days. Most seem to end up as a sequence of action bubbles punctuated by cut-scenes, often with super-heavy hints about the "correct" way to handle the situation - sometimes even unwinnable (through e.g. infinitely spawning enemies) until you do things the "right" way. And the resulting primary gameplay experience…

>I still miss games like Thief

To that list i'll add system shock 2 and Dues Ex 1

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

#97

Post by wisty »

primigenus wrote: post #90
jarrett wrote: post #31

For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…

I wonder what would happen if you offloaded the rendering of a movie like Monsters University to something like Google Compute Engine. Would it cost an arm and a leg? Or would it solve a lot of scaling/cost/time challenges?

I think Pixar will do low-resolution runs all through the day (so people can get immediate feedback on what they are doing), and a high resolution run overnight (so they can see the current product). If you're at close to 100% utilisation, and have a large cluster, renting hardware is very cost inefficient.

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

#98

Post by owyn »

primigenus wrote: post #90
jarrett wrote: post #31

For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…

I wonder what would happen if you offloaded the rendering of a movie like Monsters University to something like Google Compute Engine. Would it cost an arm and a leg? Or would it solve a lot of scaling/cost/time challenges?

It would cost an arm and a leg... it would be interesting to run the calculation though. There are a lot of bottlenecks in running a render farm like that, but one of them is just moving the data around. A typical scene uses upwards of 1TB of data (textures, etc) and every scene has a different set of data. So there is a lot of local caching on a fast SAN. Since the cost of hardware is amortized over many simultaneous productions and the farm runs at pretty close to 100% 24/7, I think the hardware investment is paid for quickly.

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

#100

Post by jarrett »

primigenus wrote: post #90
jarrett wrote: post #31

For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object a…

I wonder what would happen if you offloaded the rendering of a movie like Monsters University to something like Google Compute Engine. Would it cost an arm and a leg? Or would it solve a lot of scaling/cost/time challenges?

I once tried offloading rendering (Blender to be exact) to Amazon EC2. It turned out to be extremely costly. Rendering a 3-minute video at 1080 would have cost me $60. Yeah, peanuts for Pixar, but remember this is 3 minutes at 1080, not the ungodly amount of pixels they have to render. Also it was a pretty simple scene; a more complex one would have cost more.
Post reply on HN