What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graphics&

[Daliden]

A while back there was some talk about how it will soon be possible to render Pixar-equivalent graphics in real-time. There even was a demonstration of real-time rendering, albeit at a low resolution and no AA.

Time has passed, but has there been any progress in this field? Do any current 3D modelling programs have realtime rendering that uses pixel shaders? What other stuff is going on?

 

[jvd]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

A while back there was some talk about how it will soon be possible to render Pixar-equivalent graphics in real-time. There even was a demonstration of real-time rendering, albeit at a low resolution and no AA.

Time has passed, but has there been any progress in this field? Do any current 3D modelling programs have realtime rendering that uses pixel shaders? What other stuff is going on?

I would have to say in the next few years toy story 1 graphics will start to apear. Its not only procesing power that matters its also memory performance and storage. I'm pretty sure the textures and everything else was in the 100s of gigabytes per frame for toy story. Which was run at 23.3 fps i think . Not sure on that.

 

[Daliden]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

I would have to say in the next few years toy story 1 graphics will start to apear. Its not only procesing power that matters its also memory performance and storage. I'm pretty sure the textures and everything else was in the 100s of gigabytes per frame for toy story. Which was run at 23.3 fps i think . Not sure on that.

Surely some of those 100s of gigabytes can be generated with procedural textures in the shaders themselves, i.e., the rendering won't surely be that memory-intesive?

What has been achieved with the current generation of hardware?

 

[jvd]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

I would have to say in the next few years toy story 1 graphics will start to apear. Its not only procesing power that matters its also memory performance and storage. I'm pretty sure the textures and everything else was in the 100s of gigabytes per frame for toy story. Which was run at 23.3 fps i think . Not sure on that.

Surely some of those 100s of gigabytes can be generated with procedural textures in the shaders themselves, i.e., the rendering won't surely be that memory-intesive?

What has been achieved with the current generation of hardware?

Mabye but then again i believe toy story 2 used ray tracing. So that would up the anty again along with more textures , effects , layers and what not . Just look at the graphics of half life 2 and doom3 these are currently the best real time graphics on any hardware us consumers can buy . Do you think they come close to toy story ?

 

[Dio]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

I would have to say in the next few years toy story 1 graphics will start to apear.

I think you'll find that in some respects graphics will be significantly better, while in others it will lag.

For example, at the moment there doesn't seem to be a great consumer-level solution to real time motion blur.

 

[Daliden]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

Mabye but then again i believe toy story 2 used ray tracing. So that would up the anty again along with more textures , effects , layers and what not . Just look at the graphics of half life 2 and doom3 these are currently the best real time graphics on any hardware us consumers can buy . Do you think they come close to toy story ?

Most certainly ray-tracing will produce problems. Then again, I suppose the CPU could be used to assist in the rendering -- or would that be considered cheating?

Anyway, surely shaders optimized for one scene only running a fixed path would produce a big speed-up, as would not having to run the game engine along with the rendering engine. And although the games require 40+ or even 60+ fps, the movie version would only need 24 fps. With a much higher resolution, of course (or maybe not, wouldn't DVD resolution be sufficient -- and who would settle into playing HL2 at 720x576?).

So I guess my point is that I don't think it's quite as bad as that

 

[VFX_Veteran]

Here's the deal:

3d hardware acceleration is just beginning to become interesting for us. It is still quite a ways off from us using it for daily use and significantly a ways off from they becoming the primary rendering processor.

I can see Maya using it first, then expanding on it. There are still a lot of problems that 3d boards can't do very well:

o Geometry-intensive characters (i.e. NUBS, fur, etc..)
o Procedural texturing (the entire library, and not just pre-computing to a texture or using a simple step function).
o Ambient Occlusion
o Skin shaders with physical attributes altered in realtime.
o Still no BRDF based off of a decent lighting model (in realtime).
o Volumetric effects using ray-casting (need a ray-tracer).

I can think of some others, but these are some..

-M

 

[jvd]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

Mabye but then again i believe toy story 2 used ray tracing. So that would up the anty again along with more textures , effects , layers and what not . Just look at the graphics of half life 2 and doom3 these are currently the best real time graphics on any hardware us consumers can buy . Do you think they come close to toy story ?

Most certainly ray-tracing will produce problems. Then again, I suppose the CPU could be used to assist in the rendering -- or would that be considered cheating?

Anyway, surely shaders optimized for one scene only running a fixed path would produce a big speed-up, as would not having to run the game engine along with the rendering engine. And although the games require 40+ or even 60+ fps, the movie version would only need 24 fps. With a much higher resolution, of course (or maybe not, wouldn't DVD resolution be sufficient -- and who would settle into playing HL2 at 720x576?).

So I guess my point is that I don't think it's quite as bad as that

Don't forget that most of them have huge multi sampling going on. So the rendering is extremely more dificult than you would think. Also there will never be a time when realtime rendering catches up to rendering farms.

 

[Daliden]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

Don't forget that most of them have huge multi sampling going on. So the rendering is extremely more dificult than you would think. Also there will never be a time when realtime rendering catches up to rendering farms.

Amen. And it would be silly to even try that. But a reasonably good version of the final product, rendered in real-time, editable on the fly, would be immensely helpful for the animators.

And I think that goal at least is pretty close, even if the final product is rendered using a render farm.

 

[archie4oz]

Mabye but then again i believe toy story 2 used ray tracing.

Nope... PRman didn't support ray-tracing at that time. In fact, you'll find ray-tracing used as little as possible in most film production pipelines except in special cases where it's easier and the segment is small enough that you don't have to worry about the speed penalty.

Most certainly ray-tracing will produce problems. Then again, I suppose the CPU could be used to assist in the rendering -- or would that be considered cheating?

CG by nature is cheating in every respect anyways, so why artificially constrain yourself to a particular method?

 

[VFX_Veteran]

Mabye but then again i believe toy story 2 used ray tracing.
Nope... PRman didn't support ray-tracing at that time. In fact, you'll find ray-tracing used as little as possible in most film production pipelines except in special cases where it's easier and the segment is small enough that you don't have to worry about the speed penalty.

How so? I know of several major VFX houses that ray-trace all their feature productions. In fact, we use a combination of it and scanline rendering ourselves.

-M

 

[archie4oz]

How so? I know of several major VFX houses that ray-trace all their feature productions. In fact, we use a combination of it and scanline rendering ourselves.

The ray-trace every scene, or they use ray-tracing in every production? We use a combination ourselves, but we don't ray-trace every single scene, only where it's felt necessary...

 

[VFX_Veteran]

How so? I know of several major VFX houses that ray-trace all their feature productions. In fact, we use a combination of it and scanline rendering ourselves.

The ray-trace every scene, or they use ray-tracing in every production? We use a combination ourselves, but we don't ray-trace every single scene, only where it's felt necessary...

Since a lot of the shader code depends on ray-tracing here, we can ray-trace just bits of the scene. But our renderer is scanline-based.

The other studios I've worked at have ray-tracing renderers, therefore, whole scenes (and for some entire movies) are ray-traced.

-M

 

[Pavlos]

Nope... PRman didn't support ray-tracing at that time.
....

That’s true, but PRMan used the so-called “dso shadeopâ€￾ mechanism to redirect the raytracing queries to BMRT. I know that Pixar used this mechanism to selectively raytrace in some films, but I don’t think it was used in Toy Story.

With dso shadeops the user can extent the RenderMan shading language with a custom defined shading function, written in C or any other language. So, Larry Gritz wrote a dso shadeop that redirected the raytracing queries of the shading language to BMRT and returned the results to PRMAN.

And speaking of dso shadeops, this kind flexibility will never be provided by GPUs, unless they become general processing units (with disk access etc….)

And “Ice Ageâ€￾ to my knowledge was completely ray traced.

The SRT Rendering Toolkit

 

[Pavlos]

Mr Blue,
Is there any public info on the PDI’s renderer?
(it seems you are working there, judging from your profile)

The SRT Rendering Toolkit

 

[mrbill]

Re: What's the current status of "real-time Pixar graph

A while back there was some talk about how it will soon be possible to render Pixar-equivalent graphics in real-time.

For well over three years now there's been talk.

There even was a demonstration of real-time rendering, albeit at a low resolution and no AA.

Also albeit with baked, not procedural, textures. Albeit with simplified geometry. Albeit with no motion blur. You are talking about the Luxo, Jr. demonstration at MacWorld in 2001?

Time has passed, but has there been any progress in this field?

Yeah, at Siggraph 2003 I showed a toy ball procedurally shaded in real time (>60 fps) with one (not three) lights. On the plus side, it *was* motion blurred (by an ad-hoc procedural technique, which was simplified for a spinning ball, not a squashing/stretching/bouncing ball. But the method can be generalized to the full solution.) And the geometry, while simplified, was an accurate sphere to subpixel precision.

Also shown at Siggraph 2003 was a *single* uberlight in real time.


So, Reality Check: Toy Story 2 (and Toy Story before it) was rendered on the order of 1/1,00,000 real-time. (See Tom Duff's posting to comp.graphics.rendering.renderman, http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=3909BD4B.A107CD05@pixar.com ) Just let Moore's Law (no imagined cubes required) work and a uniprocessor PC will manage it in real-time 30 years later. Toy Story was released in 1995, so software rendering of Toy Story in real-time on a single processor PC should be possible around 2025.

Assume hardware rendering is on the order of 1,000 times faster than software rendering. That puts be real-time "Toy Story" 15 years after its release, or 2010, still seven years from now.

Reality Check Squared: Luxo, Jr. was rendered 1986. Add 15 years = 2001. Oops, nobody could do Luxo, Jr in real time in 2001, and still nobody has done so in 2003.


There isn't any question it will happen someday. Real-time is getting damn good, but it's still got some to go. But by the time we get there, we'll still have more to go to catch up with today's films, let alone with tomorrow's.

In the meantime, we keep dreaming.

-mr. bill

 

[VFX_Veteran]

Mr Blue,
Is there any public info on the PDI’s renderer?
(it seems you are working there, judging from your profile)

The SRT Rendering Toolkit

Negative. None that I am aware of.

-M

 

[VFX_Veteran]

And “Ice Ageâ€￾ to my knowledge was completely ray traced.

And that is true as well.

-M

 

[Colourless]

And you wouldn't know anything about Ice Age would you Mr Blue?

 

[Simon F]

And you wouldn't know anything about Ice Age would you Mr Blue?

I know it's a bit of a crime but I haven't seen Ice Age(yet).

I did, however, absolutely love "Gone Nutty" at the Siggraph Electronic Theatre. Brilliant - Mr Blue, say thanks to the team for me