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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?
This is a reversion of the norm :) [from the page linked to in the story]:
Operating System
* RedHat Linux 7.2 or higher
* Windows XP (coming soon)
Rich
The rumor on the street is that a Soho based SFX house tried this when they had a deadline that standard software rendering couldn't meet.
So they wrote an engine to do renderman->OpenGL and ran it across many boxes.
Problem was that they got random rendering artefacts by rendering on different cards - different colors etc, and couldn't figure out why.
When working on one box they got controlled results, but only had the power of one renderer.
"Gelsto is proprietary (and pricey)"
A company that wants to be payed for their work, weird !
You will see more, allot more, of this for the Linux platform in the near future.
Software may be released with source code, but no way that it will be released under GPL, most ISV's can't make a living releasing their work under GPL.
And please the "but you can provid consulting services" argument is not valid, it dont work that way in the real world.
I bet the type of people that buy this are like big time architects that have a few machines set up to do renders for clients, and want to perhaps do some additional effects for promo/confidence value, that likely already have people running that type of hardware.
Then again all those Quadro users could be CAD people and they've got no audience. =)
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
The purpose might mostly be to show people why they need to run out
and get PCI Express hardware; it completely addresses the assymetry
issue.
I'm guessing the main reason Gelato is spec'd to work on their
current AGP kit is to encourage the appearance of really impressive
benchmarks showing how much better performance is with PCI Express.
They have a good idea, and they're rolling it out at a good time,
I think.
Some folks were trying to do stuff like this with PS2 game consoles,
but I guess now they'll have more accessible toys to play with.
My phone bill, my opinions.
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.