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Final Fantasy Movie Interview
Wuhao writes: "Ars Technica managed to snag an interview with some of Square's 3D artists to discuss the Final Fantasy movie. It is filled with graphics jargon, but there's quite a few juicy bits that even I could understand."
The RenderMan Interface Standard is a very intriguing standard, attempting to be the "PostScript of 3D". It is succeeding.
.rib files, which are exactly what were used in rendering this movie. Beware though, to get the polygon counts that they have, you'll need about 1-2 gigs of disk space available for EACH FRAME, and about 1-2 gigs of free memory available to render them. Also, there is a C binding of the RenderMan Interface in which you can write a program that defines the placement of objects in a scene, and pipe the output of this program straight into the renderer. Instructions for this are available with BMRT, as is an example. All the tools to do any of this also come with BMRT, free of charge.
Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan is the RenderMan compliant renderer that is most used in movies, because it is very fast, but at the cost of several cool things. PRMan can't do true reflections, refractions, or even transparency, because it can't compute global visibility.
Ray tracers on the other hand, such as BMRT (which is fully compliant with the RI spec, and includes many extensions to the interface, which PRMan does not support) is a freeware RI raytracer. This is much slower than PRMan, because with raytracing you have to maintain all geometry in the scene in memory at all times, because you don't know where a ray will bounce until you fire the ray. (Because PRMan doesn't do reflections, it doesn't need to keep all the geometry in memory, and can discard anything not *directly* visible to the camera)
PRMan can however, fake lots of things that can give a nearly realistic effect, saving tons of time. Reflection maps, environment maps, and ambient light all simulate the true effects of things like reflections, and radiosity that all of us see when we take our eyes off of our monitors. BMRT does all of this without any faking.
Both PRMan and BMRT use the RI shading language to programatically define surfaces and volumes. Smoke in a room is a volume (or atmosphere) for example and can only accurately be controlled using a shader. The shading language of the RenderMan Interface is UNPARALLELLED in the industry and can produce some of the most realistic looking surfaces/volumes you'll ever see.
Both renderers read
Radiosity is something that PRMan cannot do. Check this stuff out: Radiosity images. These were not done with BMRT but easily could be. These were test renders for Arnold, a global illumination renderer. BMRT does global illumination and could easily (but slowly) produce images just like these. PRMan cannot do this, it simply takes too long.
So satisfy your curiosity about modern day rendering and read up on this. It is very interesting stuff.
When Hannibal asks when we might play "a game that looks like FF," Troy Brooks, the Production Systems Supervisor says he "can't even imagine."
Well, if it took 934,162 processor-days to render the final movie, thats...
22419888 hours or...
11209944 times real-time (assuming a 2hr movie)
Assuming computing power doubles every 18 months, computers will be 16777216 times faster in 36 years (24 18 month periods = 2^24 times faster)
So, a single workstation will be able to render the whole movie in real-time in the year 2037 (at 66% capacity!) Use the remaining third of the processor for game logic and A.I., and you have a game that looks like FFTSW.
Can't wait.
-Erik
Anyway, the one thing Final Fantasy has in common with Open Source business is that it lost a huge ton of money.