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I suspect that every production renderer must eventually have something like a heat map.

Back when I worked at Pixar on the RenderMan team, I was the one who implemented the cpuTime and sampleCount AOVs (i.e., passes) [0] in RenderMan RIS as well as some of the other diagnostic AOVs. And SPI's Arnold also acquired a pair of equivalent AOVs at some point [1]. The cpuTime AOV wasn't exactly novel then either, as I recall; I think there'd been something like it back in the old REYES days.

I'd also contributed a bit to the render time heatmap and added the sample count heatmap in the XML stats files [2]. Those are more thumbnail resolution than the AOVs, but on the other hand they were always-on for all generated stats files. The also displayed with nice little histograms.

One of the things that I learned in my years at Pixar was that rich diagnostics, statistics, or metrics are one of those key things that separates production renderers from other renderers. Pipeline folks, render wranglers, and TDs thrive on them.

[0] https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/REN24/Arbitrary+Output+Va...

[1] http://fundza.com/tishela/PDF/TransitionToRayTracingAtSony.p...

[2] https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/REN23/Diagnostics

Oh shoot, you're totally right -- doing a quick search reveals that Blender's Cycles engine has totally had this feature for a while and I was just completely unaware of it despite using it frequently! Although even without the heatmap pass being unique/new I'm still super excited for the rest of MoonRay, especially those delicious volumetrics!

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/pass...

Oh yes, I'm not knocking the release of MoonRay as a whole. I was at HPG '17 when the paper that erichocean mentioned was present. I'm definitely excited to get a peek at it.

I also wonder now how much work it was to disentangle it from their infrastructure? A lot of internal studio tools and libraries tend not to work outside of their studio's intranet -- not so much from direct copy protection, but more just because of heavy assumptions about filesystems and servers.

Back in the day, I was head developer of Rendition, a "real time" preview renderer that was compatible with Mental Ray in Maya. We implemented a heat map, and it was often shocking how much a seemingly innocuous aspect of a material could impact ray counts. Of course this was pre-pathtracing, so it showed up differently.

> We implemented a heat map, and it was often shocking how much a seemingly innocuous aspect of a material could impact ray counts.

Definitely. I think that "you don't know until you profile" applies just as much to optimizing renders as it does to optimizing code.

> Of course this was pre-pathtracing, so it showed up differently.

Yep, I remember those days of distribution ray tracing. There were all sorts of tricks to keep the ray trees under control, like lowering the number of glossy or shadow samples the deeper you were in the tree. I don't miss them. Pathtracing made things so much easier to tune.

Oh definitely! So much easier now. After Rendition we did another version called Spraytrace which tried to force mental ray into more of a pathtracing type mode of operation, (eliminating ray branching, rather than light transport) by faking the mental ray api return values, and overlaying our own sampling. It worked, but was rather a hack. God knows why we didn't just see the writing on the wall, and write a path tracing renderer. :-)

Why would they do this? Is this a recruitment tool? A plan to get certain architecture used more? (The article mentions Azure and some Intel hardware)

Pure inspiration?

All the above?

Nice touch on Apache license, really shows they're paying attention to open source community

I'm guessing it's a combination of genuine goodwill (Dreamworks has a history of open-sourcing stuff) and wanting to be able to hire people who already have experience with their renderer instead of having to train every new hire. Not to mention the improvements that will surely be made to it once anyone can contribute a pull request. Whatever their reasoning, I'm hyped because it seems like an unconditional win-win -- artists get a great new render engine, Dreamworks gets kudos + free development + market/mind share.

I know a guy who hacked on Apple's compiler fixing bugs. It turned into a job offer, but he didn't like the interplay of compensation and relocation. Now would have been a good time for him to check back on their relocation policy but in the interim it would be a large demotion instead of a small one.

I used to joke that F5 owes me a job and 2 month's salary for all the free QA we did for them back when their session affinity code was just a checkbox on the PR material. If they were more open that might have played out a bit differently.

LLVM and Clang (I’m assuming you’re referring to these based on timing) are not Apple’s. Both have been under the LLVM Developer Group from inception, and LLVM existed for many years before Apple hired one of the lead devs.

While it’s true that Lattner worked for Apple while he created Clang and that his personal contributions were probably biased, it’s always been an outside of Apple project with independent contributors.

LLVM used GCC C as a front end. Clang was an Apple project, since GCC wasn't designed to integrate into an IDE like Xcode.

>One of Clang's main goals is to provide a library-based architecture, so that the compiler could interoperate with other tools that interact with source code, such as integrated development environments (IDE). In contrast, GCC works in a compile-link-debug workflow; integrating it with other tools is not always easy. For instance, GCC uses a step called fold that is key to the overall compile process, which has the side effect of translating the code tree into a form that looks unlike the original source code. If an error is found during or after the fold step, it can be difficult to translate that back into one location in the original source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background

Lattner gave a tech talk at Google introducing LLVM 2.0 and explaining some of Apple's rational for creating Clang.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks

I said it was created by him while he was at Apple:

> While it’s true that Lattner worked for Apple while he created Clang and that his personal contributions were probably biased

But it wasn’t silo’d into Apple and then released to the open source field, it was created as an open source project under the LLVM Developer Group from it’s inception.

So yes, his contributions and goals were to make it targeted for Apple’s needs; but there were plenty of independent contributors that were focused on just making it a good C/C++ compiler front-end for LLVM and were more focused on making it a general competitor to GCC.

It would be more accurate to refer to is as an Apple sponsored project.

Hacker News gonna Hacker News.

I could explain it but I don't have the energy to respond to a gotcha today. This has nothing to do with the conversation in the grandparent or the whole thread really.

It’s OK to be wrong.

Just don’t spread your mistruths.

You forgot about the Swift compiler ;) which did have a lot of bugs to fix!

> It’s OK to be wrong.

It sure is. Especially when you nerdsnipe yourself and try to drag a conversation with you.

> Just don’t spread your mistruths.

You are very invested in pretty much nothing at all. What mistruths am I spreading? That Apple appreciated people fixing bugs that affected them? Oh. No.

>Nice touch on Apache license, really shows they're paying attention to open source community

Sorry am I missing some context on Apache License? Considering HN has been pro GPL / APGL for quite some time.

In general: the digital arts industry is heavily, heavily dominated by the tools artists can get access to when they're learning digital art. Artists want to create, and (as a general rule / stereotype) they have a bit less patience with the same-purpose-but-different-interface redundancy that the software industry is extremely comfortable with.

A company that doesn't make their digital art tools available to artists learning to be artists risks stalling the recruitment pipeline because all other things being equal, artists will prefer to work at a house already using tooling they know rather than be forced to learn some other thing that does something they can already do with another toolchain.

http://www.tabellion.org/et/paper17/MoonRay.pdf is also a good read.

Thanks, I'll have to check this out! And to think I thought I was going to be productive at work today before seeing this announcement...

> Really impressed that Dreamworks is making this move.

It's bone-headed. They could have partnered with a cloud vendor and maintained control and a large percent of the revenue. Instead, Amazon can now turn this into an AWS offering, drive mindshare to the AWS offering, and then bleed DreamWorks of whatever competitive advantage this offered them. AWS makes money, DreamWorks loses talent and leadership that moves over to work at AWS.

Open sourcing big software with an enterprise market and giving it a permissive license is stupid, because you can't compete. Look at pretty much every permissively licensed database vendor. Elastic's recent fight comes to mind.

In ten years, when this stuff becomes easy enough for small studios to run (something my startup is working on), the need for big studios like DreamWorks to pursue projects funded by institutional capital evaporates. Everyone will be making real time 3D animation. If you look carefully, you can see the genesis of that trend now.

If I were in a leadership position at DreamWorks, I would be staffing up how to make these offerings broadly available. How to make tools that put more people in the director seat. That sounds like the mission of a company named "Dream Works". Let more people dream. I guess this does it, just not in a way that they'll be using your company to do so.

Big disruptions are coming to the creative fields. This kind of move is like giving away the keys to Amazon for free. (I mean, they are buying Hollywood studios left and right. If you don't see it, you're asleep at the wheel.)

I disagree. Dreamworks doesn't make their money because of their rendering engine, they make it because of their movies. The engine is a necessary and integral tool for making those movies, but the engine alone is not the beating heart of Dreamworks. Open sourcing MoonRay is a smart move because it means they can start hiring people who already have prior experience with it, as well as benefit from the free optimizations and improvements the OSS community will surely make!

Having a rendering engine that's really good is useless unless you have the talent to use it to make a movie, and Dreamworks is going to maintain their branding and reputation for a long time regardless of whether their tech is open source or not.

They aren't "giving away the key" because the render engine is not the key. It's a complement, and they're simply commoditizing their complement.

While I agree that high quality art is going to become completely commonplace over the next decade or two, I really don't think it's tied in any way to one company releasing their internal render engine to the public.

Yes, I have to second this. While there is some edge to technology in the render sphere, no one went to see Moana or Sea Beasts due to the amazing water effects. They went because of word of mouth or advertising and were subsequently awed by said effects.

You can have the most advanced visual effects and still make a terrible movie. And you can make a great movie with slightly outdated effects and still wow people (Mitchels vs The Machines is a great example).

Dreamwork, being in the business of movie-making and not technology as a service, only benefits from an open renderer atmosphere. Pretrained talent, open source collaboration and contributions to improving their software and PR wins.

I'm genuinely curious, what about The Mitchells vs. The Machines graphics felt slightly outdated? It felt like they pushed the boundaries of the medium to me, including doing a lot of custom rendering work to make their final frames match their concept art as closely as possible, right down the the stroke textures and light-responsive character outlines. Or were you just referring to them not making any significant advances in physically-based rendering, because in that case I see what you're saying.

Side note, that movie was spectacular. I have poster for it on my apartment wall!

In the coming years, all sorts of people will be making films, and they'll be empowered by a new generation of editing, compositing, and rendering tools. They won't need large sums of capital or large teams to accomplish what the Pixar of yesteryear did.

There are so many people that want to direct, yet the current Hollywood regime only has so much room at the top to grow into. That's going to change.

And if you doubt that people want to be creative, just look at TikTok. Really, YouTube should have been our first evidence of this.

Similarly, video games that focus solely on amazing graphics are often incredibly boring to play, while there are plenty of low budget games that are very creative and fun to play, despite not having amazing graphics. Another example is Anime - very simple and dated graphics, yet fun characters and story lines. The renderer is far from the most important aspect of making a great movie or game, although it can certainly make it more enjoyable.

> Dreamworks doesn't make their money because of their rendering engine, they make it because of their movies.

For now.

It's their job to know where the market is heading, and the world of 3D animation is about to be blown wide open for smaller teams to accomplish what the big incumbents have done for decades.

Tooling will be one of the areas where money is made, and they just gave it away for free.

> Dreamworks is going to maintain their branding and reputation for a long time regardless of whether their tech is open source or not.

This is where we fundamentally disagree. Films currently require institutional capital and large teams to make, and that's about to change in a big way. The film industry is about to undergo something vaguely resembling what the news and journalism industry underwent as access to the tools of creation and distribution become more widespread and accessible.

The studio system exists because making movies is hard. It only needs to exist while that remains the case.

> The film industry is about to undergo something vaguely resembling what the news and journalism industry underwent

Reading your bio clearly shows why you have this POV. Keep on hustling, someday maybe it’ll be true!

The year is 2043, and I’m in the mood for a “Heat bank robbery movie with an Alien twist”.

Soon enough, convergent-rendered Val Kilmer is stumble-crawling through an extensive duct system containing numerous big city bank branches, relentlessly harried by a xenomorph Al Pacino.

Ah damn, did it go OOM trying to render De Niro?

> and giving it a permissive license is stupid

We haven't seen the license yet so might be prudent to hold off on the panic until then.

The license is Apache 2.0 [1]

[1] https://openmoonray.org/license

Is it access to high end rendering software and the hardware to run it on that is what is currently stopping small studios without a ton of money from making the kind of movies that DreamWorks and the other big studios make?

"How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" had around a couple dozen people in the art department, around 3 dozen in the sound department, over 150 in visual effects, around 100 in animation, around 150 in music, and another 150 additional crew.

I'd expect paying so many people is what makes these movies expensive and beyond the reach of smaller less well funded studios.