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i think maxwells approach to rendering will become the new norm in digital production pipelines. for a long time renderman has been the render of choice. (i know i love it). it been at the forefront of being able to breakdown complex shot in a highly optimized way. normal maps, per object render attributes. incredible shadow and other map based optimization techniques. the list goes on and on. but also being able to hit render and know you don't have to worry to much about it crashing.

but now comes transformers. a movie where the only way to complet the shot was to build and render all the highy detailed geometry. not baking out high res on low res, but full blown 10,000 objects per autobot. this is not what renderman is really good at. it took 38 hours per render on one of the most advanced farms on the planet.(don't you wish you had 4,300 processors just for rendering)

i think as computers get faster and movie push harder we will see shift from 'faked' geometry to actual geometry. and maxwell see's little decrease in speed compared to other render engines as scene complexity rises (i find maxwell takes 38 hours weather you have 100 or 10000 objects). i think this is the right way to go in terms of render technology.

my thoughs anyway.

Robert Cervellione wrote: this is not what renderman is really good at.

well, not really. reyes scanline renderers are very good at dealing with massive amount of geometry, but from what I gather autobots and decepticons are mainly raytraced, and raytracing it's expensive.

I remember reading about Pixar's first use of raytracing being during Cars and they were having to deal with 17 hour rendertimes per frame. Now I hear about Transformers having 38 hour rendertimes per frame. This may seem obvious, and it's what I assumed, but I just want to make sure I'm correct...

Those times are if you let just one computer run on the frame, correct? That's not saying that it took 38 hours with 4300 processors. Again, may be obvious, but I just want to make sure I have my facts straight when I bore my friends with these numbers.

"We don't care how long it took Chris, it just looks cool."

We're talking roughly 270,000 frames, each one taking 38 hours would take one computer 427,500 days or 1171 years to complete. With 4,300 processors it only takes about 3 months and that's if every frame has a robot in it which I doubt. So the question is how quickly could Maxwell render out the same frame, would it be faster or slower and could it all be done in one pass.

misterasset:
its 38 hr per node. each node is a dual or better. i think the dethstar array (what ilm calls it farm) has 2000 nodes. so they can render 2000 frames every 38 hours. thats 83 seconds of animation every 38 hours = 52 seconds a day. transformers is 2 1/2 hours and has 400 CG shots. now all 400 shots were not that intensive. i would say after seeing the movie that maybe 30 mins was 38hr/frame type shots which is about 35 days of rendering, not bad when you think the movie was in production for 2 years. (also at night ilm uses the desktops as part of the farm kicking up there processors to 5,300)

rivoli: my point is that "raytracing" is where the industry is going and rendermans ray tracer is a late addition and not nearly as good as the rest of the engin. and maxwell is using a technique that goes beyond traditional ray tracing and that this is the right approach for the future generation of render engines. no more fake gi, fake geometry(via bump and baked maps), fake lighting, just build it and render it as you would shoot live action.

(: ¡ǝɯoɔ llıʍ ʎǝɥʇ ˙˙˙˙ʇı plınq noʎ ɟı

Leonardo wrote:(: ¡ǝɯoɔ llıʍ ʎǝɥʇ ˙˙˙˙ʇı plınq noʎ ɟı

what the ........ ??

did you move to the south pole?

ʎlʇɔɐxǝ ʇou

Mʁ͉Uʁ͉ʁ͉ʁ͉Я DӘʁ͉ʁ͉ʁ͉Я

*ʁ͉ʁ͉ЯÑ ¢} DӘʁ()ʁ__9

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No, not back to that binary thread...

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misterasset wrote:No, not back to that binary thread...

not again!!!

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