Comment by mkaic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkaic | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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 And you can make a great movie with slightly outdated effects and still wow people (Mitchels vs The Machines is a great example).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I'm genuinely curious, what about The Mitchells vs. The Machines graphics felt slightly outdated?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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com