I'll repeat again: professional studios do NOT use ray tracing.
There are at least two full length animated films coming out this year which prove you wrong on this count. Pixar's The Incredibles is one of them. And we're not just talking about selective usage of raytracing either. Raytracing isn't just about reflection maps anymore - in particular, ambient occlusion and other global illumination effects can be done with raytracing in ways that are hard to do with other "cheats". And while possibly slower computationaly, it's easier in human set up cost, which is far more important nowadays.
Final file size may be 2k x 4k, but each one of those pixels is sub-sampled - usually 8 x 8. It's brute-force, but that's the way you get such nice anti-aliasing.
In Pixar's RenderMan - and in any other implementation based on REYES - subpixel sampling (the number of samples thrown against geometry per pixel for determining visibility) is decoupled from shading rate (how often on the geometry a color is computed). Since shading rate determines how often complex shaders are evaluated, that number is by far much more important when determining how long a render will take. And generally speaking, setting a shading rate higher than once per pixel is a waste of time.
Because of this decoupling, setting the subpixel sample rate up to 8x8 (or higher) does not make the render sixty four times slower. Depending on how complex the shader is, you might end up making the render twice as slow at most.
(Disclaimer: It's been several years since my last RenderMan render, so the techniques may have changed.)
I don't question your other points, but I do question the size factor.
> Movie quality shots are rendered at many times > that resolution, which greatly increases the > number of pixels that have to be rendered.
This isn't true for any movie I'm familiar with. In fact, I'd be highly surprised if LOTR was rendered at anything much higher than 2k resolution.
There's usually not much point to higher resolution when rendering CG for film, because jitter, grain, dust, and all the other artifacts of analog film obscure any gains you might get by doing so. Even in digital projection, a pixel at 2k by 2k res projects to something like a single inch on a typical movie screen. This might sound big, but from where you're sitting, it really isn't.
> even if that port was never released commercially
The Solaris port of PRMan *was* released commercially dating back to at least before the 3.7 release. Due to lack of customer demand, we stopped supporting it in PRMan 10.0.
Unfortunately, quite true. Spar's space robotics division was sold in 1999 to MacDonald Dettweiler, itself a subsidiary of Orbital Sciences Corporation. See:
http://www.mda.ca/news/pr/pr90507A.html
No one doing serious film work renders 125 frames per second - at least if they're using a "real" renderer. They should only be rendering at 24 frames per second, and rely on the renderer to provide the correct motion blurred content in each frame of the image - and this is certainly the case for the renderer that Weta uses.
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least two full length animated films coming out this year which prove you wrong on this count. Pixar's The Incredibles is one of them. And we're not just talking about selective usage of raytracing either. Raytracing isn't just about reflection maps anymore - in particular, ambient occlusion and other global illumination effects can be done with raytracing in ways that are hard to do with other "cheats". And while possibly slower computationaly, it's easier in human set up cost, which is far more important nowadays.
Someone removes a promotion, so Lt. Commander Smith won't be confused with Ensign Smith. :)
Pixar isn't changing the farm. As for RenderMan, the current release is already available for OSX in a beta form.
In Pixar's RenderMan - and in any other implementation based on REYES - subpixel sampling (the number of samples thrown against geometry per pixel for determining visibility) is decoupled from shading rate (how often on the geometry a color is computed). Since shading rate determines how often complex shaders are evaluated, that number is by far much more important when determining how long a render will take. And generally speaking, setting a shading rate higher than once per pixel is a waste of time.
Because of this decoupling, setting the subpixel sample rate up to 8x8 (or higher) does not make the render sixty four times slower. Depending on how complex the shader is, you might end up making the render twice as slow at most.
They haven't
I don't question your other points, but I do question the size factor.
> Movie quality shots are rendered at many times
> that resolution, which greatly increases the
> number of pixels that have to be rendered.
This isn't true for any movie I'm familiar with. In fact, I'd be highly surprised if LOTR was rendered at anything much higher than 2k resolution.
There's usually not much point to higher resolution when rendering CG for film, because jitter, grain, dust, and all the other artifacts of analog film obscure any gains you might get by doing so. Even in digital projection, a pixel at 2k by 2k res projects to something like a single inch on a typical movie screen. This might sound big, but from where you're sitting, it really isn't.
> even if that port was never released commercially
The Solaris port of PRMan *was* released commercially dating back to at least before the 3.7 release. Due to lack of customer demand, we stopped supporting it in PRMan 10.0.
Unfortunately, quite true. Spar's space robotics division was sold in 1999 to MacDonald Dettweiler, itself a subsidiary of Orbital Sciences Corporation. See:
http://www.mda.ca/news/pr/pr90507A.html
For The Birds will also be playing before Monsters Inc in theatres.
No one doing serious film work renders 125 frames per second - at least if they're using a "real" renderer. They should only be rendering at 24 frames per second, and rely on the renderer to provide the correct motion blurred content in each frame of the image - and this is certainly the case for the renderer that Weta uses.