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Improv Animation as an Art Form?
Dean Siren asks: "When will mainstream moviemakers, such as Lucasfilm, finally replace their render farms and Renderman with a GPU (Geforce or Radeon) and Cg based renderer? Would the savings in equipment cost and rendering time be worth the learning curve? Is anyone developing such an app? We've had the tech for years with video games, but the art form hasn't really been tried. Is anyone working on this now?" An interesting thought, and it puts an interesting spin on the old computers-will-replace-actors argument. It also means good planning ahead of time, since there will be no "post-production" stage where you can clean up the mistakes, and perform the minute adjustments needed to make things just right. Do you think such an art form will ever catch on in Hollywood, or will small shops have to be the ones to pioneer this before others follow suit?
"There's a forum called Machinima whose main idea is that not only should the final rendering of a movie be generated in real time, but so should the animation, implying that computer animation should be performed, maybe even improvised, live by motion captured voice actors. Accomplishing this goal would require replacing not only Renderman but Maya and Softimage as well. A developer named Strange Company took the challenge and started writing an app in this direction called Lithtech Film Producer (interview here). They even made easy porting a high priority. But they soon realized that they were tiny and the project was huge so they quit. But the idea of improv animation is full of potential."
A software renderer is just plain more flexible. When there's something you want to change in the rendering process, fix the code, recompile, distribute to the renderfarm. Done.
When there's something you want to change in your hardware-based rendering, what are you going to do, re-fab the silicon and solder it in?
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Shader languages such as Cg (Indeed, even Cg itself) is supported by many software renderers. Software renderers use pixel shaders, they just don't do it in realtime or in hardware.
So it is in fact conceivable that we can see professional pre-rendered animations done using Cg.
Looks like you people don't know what you're talking about. GPUs and shader languages are independant.
Regards, Guspaz.
I read this and immediately remembered when Brian Henson (Jim Henson's son, of Muppets fame) came and gave a talk at my school last year.
One of the things "The Creature Shop," the company he runs, is working on, is digitally animated puppets which are played in real-time the way that a normal puppet would be. He didn't give too many technical details then, but I found this press release, check it out:t ml
http://www.henson.com/company/press/html/060601.h
I think that GPUs (at least, nowadays) are too focused on the tasks they have to perform (working with relatively little polygons, applying a few "small" textures etc., all of this in a very short time) to be useful in a totally different task like animation, where you have to work with huge amount of polygons, with complex textures etc., even with special software.
You also have to add the fact that many GPUs have specialyzed "special effects" built in, like light effects and similar stuff that may look great in a game, but are totaly useless in a movie, as they would be too standard and not-so-effective, so you will only be able to use the standard features of your GPU and still use the CPU for most of the work on special effects etc.
Even worse, video cards are more and more focused on speed rather than quality, and this is not going to help when making a movie.
Of course they could have some board specifically designed for the tasks they need, and this would surely improve the time needed to render a movie, but I'm not so sure whether it would be worth the cost.
Rushes... we do those... (its nice to see when your studio isn't completely out in left field)
But when done, the system takes over the GL display and the frame sections are copied off of the GL buffer on to disk... at least in Maya... if I remember correctly.
For the most part, we will do those for animation checks, but every night the animator will still have a flip rendered of their work at that stage. The nice thing about only doing one movie at a time is that all the renderboxes are dedicated to what stage of production you are in, so the artists can get actual renders back instead of hardware approximations.
Also due to the way we do mouths, we need flips to see mouth animation on the veggie characters.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
The Inquirer has a nice story about rendering Final Fantasy in real-time with GeForce4.
Scene is vastly simplified (polygon count was 10% of the original), but it's still an impressive achievement. In a couple of years we could have Final Fantasy graphics in our games.
I think that it will be only a matter of time before GPUs replace (atleast partially) CPU renderfarms:
1. "Lack" of Renderman isn't a problem. Cg has almost same syntax as Rendermans shading language, you can do any Renderman effect in Cg.
2. Memory bandwidth is another strength of the GPUs. Pentium4 has a biggest memory bandwidth of single CPU systems, still it's "only" 4.2GB/s. Current GeForce4 has over 10GB/s of memory bandwidth. By moving to 256bit memory bus and DDR-II we will get 256MB framebuffer with incredible 30GB/s memory bandwidth by the end of the next year in consumer levels cards. Combine this with eight rendering pipelines and more advanced shaders and you will get incredible processing power for just $400.
This reminds me of the first time I went to SIGGraph, the big convention for computer art geeks. It was really cool, since there were lots of high-end toys to play with. It was about 6 years ago, and VR was really big at the time. Everyone had some sort of poor headset display that would make you sick or give you a headache. Many people had special "3D input devices" like a mouse with a stick at the end that you drew NURBS in real time or somesuch.
Anyways, the other really big thing were the motion-captured, live 3D actors. They'd project an avatar of someone up onto a big screen, and have them try to talk to hold conversations with you and the like. It was actually kind of annoying.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
> In a nutshell, this topic makes zero sense.
;)
Agreed
> Talk to somebody like ILM or PIXAR thats doing renderings that take 70 hours a frame (like some of the frames for Toy Story II did) and talk about real time cards. They have a good laugh and say "go away kid".
I'm one of the programmers for a high end visualization program. One of our customers recently rendered an image that took over 200 hours on a dual 2 GHz machine. Other customers routinely use render farms of 100+ machines. I can tell you that _MY_ GeForce4 TI 4600 bogs down to under 2 fps on some of the scenes that I'm previewing, then it sometimes takes nearly an hour to render lo-res versions of the image. Hi-res work for film or posters takes MUCH longer.
> This is a silly pointless discussion.
Well, it should serve to help my Karma, but wait, I'm logged in as AC because I _SHOULD_ be working too...
There are some colorful comments here about how studios will never-ever-ever replace tools like renderman on render farms with hardware accelerated rendering. These comments are wrong.
The current generation of cards do not have the necessary flexibility, but cards released before the end of the year will be able to do floating point calculations, which is the last gating factor. Peercy's (IMHO seminal) paper showed that given dependent texture reads and floating point pixels, you can implement renderman shaders on real time rendering hardware by decomposing it into lots of passes. It may take hundreds of rendering passes in some cases, meaning that it won't be real time, but it can be done, and will be vastly faster than doing it all in software. It doesn't get you absolutely every last picky detail, but most users will take a couple orders of magnitude improvement in price performance and cycle time over getting to specify, say, the exact filter kernel jitter points.
There will always be some market for the finest possible rendering, using ray tracing, global illumination, etc in a software renderer. This is analogous to the remaining market for vector supercomputers. For some applications, it is still the right thing if you can afford it. The bulk of the frames will migrate to the cheaper platforms.
Note that this doesn't mean that technical directors at the film studios will have to learn a new language -- there will be translators that will go from existing langauges. Instead of sending their RIB code to the renderfarm, you will send it to a program that decomposes it for hardware acceleration. They will return image files just like everyone is used to.
Multi chip and multi card solutions are also coming, meaning that you will be able to fit more frame rendering power in a single tower case than Pixar's entire rendering farm. Next year.
I had originally estimated that it would take a few years for the tools to mature to the point that they would actually be used in production work, but some companies have done some very smart things, and I expect that production frames will be rendered on PC graphics cards before the end of next year. It will be for TV first, but it will show up in film eventually.
John Carmack
Is it a slow news day or what???
I have no idea, and while slashdot certainly murdered this topic in the headline, doing production quality rendering using hardware acceleration is a huge HUGE BIG MASSIVE fucking deal and not many people seem to realize it yet.
Nobody is going to drop PRman for Cg anytime soon. Why? Because they have two different target markets and address two different need
People used PRman in the first place because of its speed and quality. Cg has one down pretty easily, the quality is something that isn't that much harder. Rendering in hardware DOES NOT have to be realtime in order to be beneficial.
Can these cards handle anti-aliasing like RM can? No.
Not in realtime, not yet, but it doesn't matter, since anti-aliasing is not only becoming a very high priority on 3d card makers' lists, but anti-aliasing can be done by simply rendering the samer frame multiple times and blending them together until the actual card has high quality AA enabled, which should be in the next generation.
Can these cards handle DOF like RM can? No.
PRman does a depth based DOF which can be done in post with a z-buffer. If that isn't high quality enough the frame can also be renderered in sections, and/or multiple frames can be rendered with slight offsets etc etc. There are dozens of ways to make it work.
Can these cards to programmable shading like RM can? No.
Fuck yeah they can! That's the whole point. Where do think these shader languages came from? Large shaders can always be broken down and rendered in passes.
These cards are designed to do graphics real time with the best quality they can squeeze out while still hitting their timing targets. RM is meant to get the best possible quality - and who cares about time?
No there cards are designed to render images quickly with quality as a second priority to time. There is a difference. You are implying that they will reduce the quality to hit realtime framerates, which is not true. PRman (if that is what you are referring to by RM) was used and still is used because of its quality and speed, speed being a very high consideration, with quality taking precedent. Speed is everything. Speed breeds quality.
This is a silly pointless discussion. Yes, in 10 or 20 years maybe the hardware will be there, but it isn't now and you sound silly making speculations like these.
This is about as important as discussions on 3D come. This is as huge as anything that has happened to the 3D industry. This is revolution over evolution. This is the next big step that 3D will take after the invention of gourad shading, phong shading, Renderman, and hardware acceleleration. This will start to happen by the end of the year, not in 20 years. 3D is great now, but it is about to get really really good.
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