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Nvidia Releases Hardware-Accelerated Film Renderer
snowtigger writes "The day we'll be doing movie rendering in hardware has come: Nvidia today released Gelato, a hardware rendering solution for movie production with some advanced rendering features: displacement, motion blur, raytracing, flexible shading and lighting, a C++ interface for plugins and integration, plus lots of other goodies used in television and movie production. It will be nice to see how this will compete against the software rendering solutions used today. And it runs under Linux too, so we might be seeing more Linux rendering clusters in the future =)" Gelato is proprietary (and pricey), which makes me wonder: is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?
For some possible applications, check out machinima.com - film-making in real time using game engines.
Xenu loves you!
Alias has Maya for Linux. Newtek has Lightwave rendering node software for Linux. There are a few other 3D packages like AC3D too.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is not really correct. The graphics cards Gelato uses are consumer hardware. This doesn't mean that the image is generated directly by the card! The 3D hardware is used as a specialized fast and parallel calculation unit, used especially for geometric calculation (matrix per vertex multiplication, essentially) and other stuff. This (of course) means that the rendering is NOT done in realtime.
This might also be interesting: GPGPU /Arvid
Take a look at the Jashaka project. It is a real time video editing suit and the designers have been working with and have supposedly been getting support from Nvidia, so they may have had access and I would imagine certainly will have access to these video cards. I can't imagine them not taking advantage of this technology.
The other nice thing is if memory serves me correctly this program is being designed to work on Windows, Linux and OS X, so good news all around.
"Napalm is nature's toothpaste" - Chef Brian
is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?
A quick Googling revealed the following:
- BrookGPU
- GPGPU
Insightful my ass.
Maya, Houdini and XSI are all available for Linux, and they work well.
For those who don't remember, BMRT was a really cool RenderMan based renderer that Pixar had some sort of love/hate relationship with. IIRC, they used it, yet they sued the company. At the end nVidia bought them, though it wasn't clear why at the time.
I think that indeed there is free software to do movies and rendered animations using raytracing. First, Cinelerra can use a linux cluster for movie rendering. Second, there's a whole bunch of modellers/raytracers out there that perform very well: Povray is the oldest and most advanced, and can run on a pvm cluster, yafray is relatively recent and can use an openmosix cluster for networked rendering, Blender now integrates a raytracer AND exports to yafray. Those are the 4 programs I know of that I use, but there are more, I just haven't looked for more. So, yes, there is free software for movie rendering already!
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
See here and here. More and more pieces of the moviemaking toolchain are available Openly, only a matter of time before someone adds a GUI wrapper to integrate it all. Will they dare call it Raxip? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
PRMan is a fine product, but it has its limitations, as well as its price. There are numerous competitors, many of which use the same Renderman interface but offer more speed and/or more features at a lower price (BMRT and Entropy are[were] notable, and relevant, until Pixar squashed them with the threat of an expensive court case). Brazil, AIR, etc - these RIB-based renderers drop into the same place in the workflow.
Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine?
Only if you explain why your average UNIX or Linux machine is better than a Commodore 64 or a PDA, which is also "in essence nothing but processor operations" etc :-) If you listed SPEED in there, you're on the right track.
A modern GPU has far more floating-point hardware than any general-purpose CPU, and it's all geared towards the process of rendering pixels. For certain tasks, one of those expensive dedicated rendering devices from nVidia could be better than FIFTY of your "average" UNIX or Linux machines! Is that enough of an advantage to consider?
Dang, I went and fed the troll, didn't I...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Correct, there aren't any advantages, only disadvantages. (More expensive, proprietary hardware, unproven etc.)
And, apparently, orders of magnitude faster.
Personally, I'd put that rather firmly into the advantage column, and for a number of reasons. You could either render your movie with a smaller farm (always a plus) or you could render even more complex scenes in the same time period--which is probably what most people would use this technology for. On the commentary track of Monsters Inc, the guys from Pixar note that despite having MUCH faster hardware (and alot more of it) the average time to render a single frame of Monsters Inc was just as long as a single frame of Toy Story. Why? Because the frames were FAR more complex.
I think this is a Good Thing(tm) at least for the people who have the imagination to use it.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
How do you know this? Did you perform benchmark comparing it to a real Quadro?
A couple of years ago I got a GeForce4 4800 and a Quadro4 900 XGL. I performed the required resistor mod and flashed the GeForce4 with the Quadro4's BIOS.
Sure the GeForce4 got recognised as a Quadro4 900 XGL in the Windows display control panel, but when you run benchmarks like SPECViewPerf it was obvious the modded-GeForce4 did NOT perform like a real Quadro4 900 XGL. Capabilities like the HW-accelerated clip planes did not seem to present in the GeForce4, and this made a big difference to the scores I was getting.