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?

Comments

Fab for machinima

[Paul Crowley]

For some possible applications, check out machinima.com - film-making in real time using game engines.

Re:This would be more useful

[BiggerIsBetter]

Alias has Maya for Linux. Newtek has Lightwave rendering node software for Linux. There are a few other 3D packages like AC3D too.

Re:3D graphics cards aren't relevant

[Oscaro]

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.

Linux software

[HenchmenResources]

Is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?

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.

Using GPU for signal processing

[PastaAnta]

is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?

A quick Googling revealed the following:
- BrookGPU
- GPGPU

Nice to see some good out of BMRT/Exluna.

[ron_ivi]

Renderman.org's summary of Exluna & BMRT describes where much of this technology probably came from.

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.

Re:Nice to see some good out of BMRT/Exluna.

[ron_ivi]

And a nice Siggraph presentation of some of the capabilities of BMRT.

Interestingly, BMRT was free as in $$$ but not as in Free Software. This was one of the first software packages where I first recognized how big this distinction is. (A free as in Free Software program probably would have continued on as people may have coded around some of the disputed intellectual property - a free as in $$$ program was possible to kill with the carrot and stick of a lawsuit and buyout opportunity)

Free software ready indeed!

[Goeland86]

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!