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Intel and DreamWorks Working On Rendering Animation In Real-Time
PolygamousRanchKid writes "This week while speaking at the Techonomy conference, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told audience members that they'd formulated the solution for real-time rendering of animation for video. Katzenberg told the audience that they'd been working hand-in-hand with Intel in order to rewrite their software to take advantage of scalable multi-core processors, this allowing them to achieve advances that will, for lack of a better term, revolutionize the animation process."
Because we all want them to pump out more Shrek films as fast as possible amirite?
But as it would be in final production, with today's level of detail, that would be pretty cool.
Probably have to chain down the voice actors, though it you want the full effect.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are they going to remake Toy Story with the Crysis engine?
Homer: Uh, I guess. Is this episode going on the air live?
June Bellamy: No, Homer. Very few cartoons are broadcast live. It's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists.
So management finally discovered SMP and threading about 20 years or so after it was introduced onto the types of systems all of these outfits have been using since the beginning of time?
Sedate this fellow before he starts to perpetrate some more "management".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If graphics can render 50 times faster, that still says nothing about the actual animation or the assets used (other than there'd be more time to experiment with stuff like that). So the only benefit I could see would be game consoles catching up to movies. ...but I imagine that's 50 times speedup with the existing equipment that movie companies have. Try to foist that technology on games and you'll have game consoles that are WAY too expensive. There's a reason game consoles can't reach the quality a PC can: they have to keep costs low so people can afford them.
Also, I can't help but think game consoles are already doing parallel work with multiple CPUs (why else would PS3 have eight of them) to render its graphics fast enough. You can't be telling me that a big movie company hasn't made use of multiple processors yet.
"allowing them to achieve advances that will, for lack of a better term, revolutionize the animation process."
Maybe he's hinting at live realtime rotoscoping?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping
If you're unfamiliar with the technique watch the drug film "a scanner darkly".
This would be completely appropriate for a live event like the republican debate; I don't think those guys make sense without being on "substance D" anymore. (note I used to be a hard core "R" before they went completely batshit insane a decade or so ago, so I'm allowed to talk about "us" using that kind of language)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Use a Kinect to do the motion capture and interface it with this and everything, even live action news can have the look and feel of a Dreamworks picture.....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
there's been a documentary of someone doing a kids show with an animated character rendered in realtime, from a motion captured actor jumping round and another doing the facial expressions with a bunch of knobs and handles
Real time rendering can only be a human animator pipeline productivity tool, not a production rendering technique. Otherwise your render farm is 100% idle unless someone is changing something, so you're wasting virtually all your time and rendering power that could be going towards better quality. Slow rendering gives the hardware something productive to do while the humans are thinking/sleeping.
I think Avatar claimed they spent something like 40 hours on each frame, so no way are we going from hours/frame to 1/24 of a second per frame, even for cheap low-quality throwaway TV production.
Nothing to see here I suspect.
G.
From TFA..."The collaboration with Intel is bring us just that."
I'd like a pair of glasses that does this. Seeing the world as a cartoon might be great.
One link says 50-70 times faster, and the other says 50-70 percent faster.
Does anyone actually feel like watching the video to see what the claim is?
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The number of very expensive US staff needed with the skills to get the "math" or fantasy art right?
The detail needed to make it 4K and 8K ready needs many new Intel boxes?
Or is it just a huge set of current product been linked together with some old distributed computing protocol at very new hardware prices?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Actually blender can do this in 2 ways!
Since last Blender Conference last October, Cycles has been announced as the new render for Blender.
This is a realtime renderer that uses Progressive Rendering and can render realtime on CPU, GPU or both!
This can also be done for animation.
But this is possible for quite a while, since blender also can do OpenGL rendering realtime, and you can use the BGE as a realtime viewport.
So been there, done that, open sourced it
The more CPU time you got, the more quality. Real-time animation is not going to look as good as non-realtime animation. However, the good news of the article summary is that CPU's, and the algorithm they devised, are now fast enough for having real-time rendering that DreamWorks finds good enough to call animation quality! Nice.
That would actually be pretty damn cool if I could have Morbo doing the news for me, other people watching the same news feed could have different avatars reading their news for them.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
While this is a wonderful advancement, I feel that it is now even more of an excuse to completely forget about actual artists and hand drawn animation. When is the last time an American animation company released a hand drawn cartoon? Sometimes it's nice to have a bit more of the human element involved.
Honestly I understand why the UI is (or was?) the way it is, but it seriously puts off so many starting amateurs who can just get the free student/educational license "million point&click tutorials available" 3ds Max or Maya.
probably have the paperwork filed already
No matter how fast a computer is, it is not going to speed up how long it takes an animator to animate.
The animator still has to consider the movement they want to achieve, move the rig, adjust keyframes, etc., etc. This will always take time to do.
I'm not sure that rendering is necessarily the thing that most needs sped up for the artist. What would help the artist more is speeding up of things that require simulation such as hair, particles, fluids, physics, etc.
Rendering is just the button you click when you're all done and ready to move on to the next shot.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
the uncanny valley. And yet we already have a solution - don't use DreamWorks crappy human animations or models.
There will never be a way to render out high quality renders in real time. There isnt enough processing in the world or ram to catch up to the production demands.
Global illumination models with indirect lighting, where multiple bounces occur throughout the scene... through glass, through motion blur... etc. Its just not going to happen. The amount of real time displacement mapping that is required is simply not possible. The ram processing demands are going to be ridiculous. Its why we cant render them out real time now.
But we can render out videogames. Sorry Katz, you're a hack and a mouth piece of shit you dont know anything about.
This isn't a problem for animators. Getting the models and motion right requires only the quality of a good graphics card. It's tweaking lighting, shaders, and post effects, the "look", that needs many repeats of full rendering. That's done by colorists and post people.
Does it run Linux ?
Sounds Magical!
Why not just start using FPS game engines?
Don't most modern engines pretty much do this anyway on an interactive level? (scripting/setup of level aside)
Just imagine being able to put the camera in any spot you like. Hell, walk around the movie first-person style. Explore the world, triggering the rest of the movie as you go along? Branching story paths? Triggerable easter eggs?
There's so much potential for this. Game and animated movie will start to blend even more, at high quality and at any desired resolution.
I am not devoid of humor.