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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."
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