Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

VERY FAR I think.

Take Transformers 3 for example: "It took 288 hours PER FRAME to render the Driller along with the photo-real CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass."

Less complicated scenes in Pixar films take hours to render just ONE frame, which is why they do it using thousands of powerful computers at render farms working together.

And even then, you can tell the scene is CG.

Maybe in 50 years when we all have the power of a render farm in our graphics cards we'll be able to, but even then. It's just not worth the cost of development. Storing massive textures like that would require an insane amount of hard drive space. Creating textures like, physics engines, character models, worlds, lighting, etc... would exponentially multiply the cost of cost of game development to a point that it's just not worth it.

Is it possible? YES. Is it feasible? NO. Why? Because being able to render a photo-realistic scene with humans in it means being able to develop a game with photo-realistic scenes without the studio going bankrupt.

There actually a lot of CG used in movies which people don't notice. Generally, if they are actually trying to fool you it works surprisingly well. Consider, movies don't show vary realistic explosions not because we can't do it but because stylized balls of fire look more interesting than flashes that end in a single frame. It might be hard to do realistic humans but, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWE18YjLA8U it starts do really unnatural things and yet it does not scream CGI.

Fifty years? Not even.

288 hours means it takes 17,280,000ms to render one frame of footage. To render one on-screen frame of a game running at 60FPS you have 16.6ms to render the frame. This is a difference of about 2^20, or twenty doublings in speed.

Assuming CPU power can be doubled every 18 months, which still seems to be the case even if the power of individual cores is not increasing as quickly as it used to be, then you're looking at 18 times 20 months, or 360 months. This is fifteen years.

It's also the case that today's systems have a lot more than one CPU. If you take a consumer system that already has four cores and a GPU to boost performance even further, that could shave two to five years off the time.

Actually once you can ray trace in realtime content creation is the easy part. Just setup a light source and say this is cloth/metal etc. Not sure where you were going with that...

> 288 hours PER FRAME

So it took close to a year to render each second on-screen. I do not believe this.

288 cpu hours.

Divide that by a large number of CPUs.

Most rendering is very parallelizable.

Yeah, that's a day on a 12-core system.

Rendering is one of those embarassingly parallelizable problems we've been hearing so much about.

I believe that number is per node, e.g. they have a cluster of 10 nodes that rendered for 24 hours producing 1 frame per day. Much like the concept of "man-hours" in a project.

[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/transformers-dark-moon...

There's only 24 frames in a second for production-caliber film. They also throw an obscene number of cores at the problem. On a 12 core system you can render that out in a day. If you have 24 of those systems in a rack you can pump out one second of film time per day.

That means in a month you can deliver 30 seconds of footage. If you have a five minute sequence, get ten racks like that and you can turn it around inside a month.

Also, since when is 288 hours even close to a year?

288 hours per frame, 24 frames per second, 24 hours per day = 288 days per second of film time.

Pretty close but the assumption that you'd be using a single CPU is wrong.

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