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Nvidia's Dave Kirk Explains The Point of Cg

Posted by timothy on from the who-needs-actroids dept.

An anonymous roward writes "This interview at ZDNet UK has Dave Kirk talking about how Nvidia's Cg programming language will bring movie-making and game-writing together. 'This is a big step towards convergence -- not films and movies and games being the same, but the way people create them being the same. Artists can use the same skills on both. Cg is almost guaranteed to be efficient in hardware, and any Renderman program can be translated to Cg, by hand or by a tool that someone's developing. Once that happens, all the moviemaking can take place in Cg.'"

1 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. Missing the point by winchester · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It seems to me NVidia misses the point when it comes to Renderman. There are very good reasons why Renderman has been the industry standard for as long as computer-generated special effects are used in moviemakeing.

    First of all, there are millions and millions of lines of code that are generating or modifying RIB and SL. Entire toolchains are built around it. In other words... Renderman is there, proven and established. And when i say proven, i mean proven in the production environment of a motion picture.

    Second, as seen in several posts both here (in previous topics) and on usenet (search comp.graphics.rendering.renderman), real-time redering is currently not an option, and will probably not be an option for the forseeable future. The reason for this is simple... if the hardware or software gets more powerful, then the desire of the director to use that power to make things even more lifelike will also increase. Just look at Toy Story 2 vs. Toy Story... the scenes and textures are immensely more complex, resulting in a production time that wasn't significantly shorter, even though both motion pictures are quite some years apart.

    Third, Renderman is a VERY flexible tool to work with. You can do as good as everything you want when it comes to geometry, and when it comes to texturing, you can write almost every texture you can imagine in the Shading Language. You have to have worked the SL to fully appreciate the power and flexibility of it.