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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds.

"Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but having an alternative which is viable on a shoestring budget is very valuable.

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Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.

I kind of hope they don't. I like the humble, democratic, FOSS spirit - it's like Dogme 95 / "Vows of Chastity".

"rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, while excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the directors as artists" as opposed to the movie studio."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95

I had a negative initial reaction to the animation style but it hooked me in and blew me away. It had virtues far more vital than render quality. In contrast, I bailed on "Inside Out 2" and have no interest retrying. I hope more people are encouraged to create lofi meaningful movies instead of thinking it's the preserve of billion dollar studios and sweat-shop animation factories.

Haven't watched yet but that was my gut reaction. When the engine first got stable released I tried it and was impressed at how quickly it got to a 90% solution, but the now complicated lighting scenarios that it couldn't handle took me back to cycles.

First off, switching to Cycles is probably quite a bit of work. While the renderers are supposed to be interchangeable, since AFAIK Cycles supports more features than Evee, options that previously did not matter with Evee rendering now have to be set for Cycles.

Also, having seen the film, I found the "unrealistic", cartoonish look very much to be a creative choice. Evee can produce much more "realistic" renders than what you see in the movie, but this requires also much more investment into things like assets and textures, otherwise you quickly land in the uncanny valley. So I think switching to Cycles probably would not matter much, unless the creators would also change their creative choices, which would result in a different movie, but not necessarily a better one.

This is arguably true for all director’s cuts and remasters ever released.

What's odd in Flow is the contrast between the near-realistic non-animal rendering, and the non-realistic animal rendering. It didn't bother me much - it was clearly an aesthetic choice - but I know people who were bothered by the contrast.

It could be revelatory.

Like the first time I played Super Mario Bros. on an LED screen. Finally I could see each pixel clearly, exactly the way the original artist didn't intend!

Edit: in all seriousness, this makes me wonder: has anyone ever re-orchestrated Beethoven's Fifth? Say, in the orchestration style of Ravel or Strauss? Someone must have done this, even as a joke, and I'd love to hear it. (I know about the "Fifth of Beethoven" disco tune which is great, but that's not what I'm asking about.)

Somewhat in this vein is Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons. I liked it, but I am definitely not a purist.

Cycle's renders are beautiful, but 10 minutes per frame can be a hard sell... I wonder, if anybody tried rendering in cycles to output eevee's primitves. I remember that was one of the tricks that architecture rendering community used - just paint with lights in places that a full blown global rendering/path tracing would do.

That is a common assumption, but there are ways to get your PC to do better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a0GW8Na5CIE

Blender has a lot of other problems, but CUDA/Optix support is there for reasonable hardware =3

I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm?

Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.

Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.

I made my own distributed render orchestrator that supports Cycles + custom plugins. It uses Modal’s cloud compute APIs to spawn jobs on up to 20x containers with an L40S GPU (like 80% as fast as a 4090 with tons more VRAM) each. It ain’t cheap but it’s absurdly fast, and much easier in terms of cash flow than outright buying the equivalent GPUs.

https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...

That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time.

I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?

Second title should have been named the Book of Job IMO

Sure why not, updated.

Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, I’m not expecting it to gain much traction, just having fun with it.

Any embarrassingly parallel task can scale almost infinitely by throwing more resources at it.

I think I've seen some amazing Blender hacker put Cycles to the test on a machine with both NVIDIA and Intel GPUs. Love it that their API seems that portable and able to parrallelize on heterogeneous hardware. Amazing software work.

Getting blender to run on my NVIDIA GPU and AMD CPU simultaneously is as easy as checking two boxes in the settings. It's not usually worth it since the GPU absolutely smokes the CPU. it's a testament to how well blender is made that it works at all, let alone that trivially.

a stupid-simple approach would be to split up the render betweeen machines by manually starting it on each one and setting different frame ranges to render

Once you feel like that isn't enough anymore, you can also start dividing each frame into a grid of N cells and distribute that :) As long as the rendering is deterministic, you'd just join the cells into a complete frame on the coordinator.

An 1.5 hour movie at 24 FPS has ~130k frames to render. As long as you have less machines than that the parallelization is essentially free.

IIRC, the Blender Foundation's Open Source movies have been rendered on render farms from the very first one, produced over 20 years ago. This predates Cycles/Eevee, but I don't think it's something they'd regress on.

Weren't Blender working on a more efficient cycles renderer?

You're probably referring to Cycles X [1], which if I'm not mistaken has already been released.

It will never be on-par with Eevee's performance though as they are fundamentally different approaches to rendering: Cycles is a physically-based path-tracing engine, while Eevee uses rasterization through OpenGL.

1: https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/

You're right.

I think I confused it with the Eevee Next project released last year.

https://code.blender.org/2024/07/eevee-next-generation-in-bl...

I just had a look at the trailer, and I'm trying not to poo on it's parade, but this thing looks... disappointing - worse than most in-game cut-scenes these days. It doesn't even feel "Artistic", and I'm definitely not a snob for "hyper realistic" types of looks.

The distant and "landscape" views look very nice, and in stark contrast to the game-like and amateur rendering of close up scenes with the animals. They don't even have anti-aliasing and the things look "blocky".

I hope this thing won because of the story and characters, and not its visuals.

I agree, but mainly for some other reasons I won't be listing just now. As much as I find it all very cute and I'm a sucker for this kind of shit (I can already sense I would cry my heart out watching this at some point or another--I know, I'm very sensitive), it kinda looks like a long-winded tech demo or video placeholder.

There are incredible visuals in the movie, but not because of their realistic details. They are instead incredibly evocative of a mysterious depth behind the relatively small story being told in the movie.

The movie doesn’t look real, but it also doesn’t act real either.

The look is scruffy.

The story is not, and the visuals are sufficient to tell the story.

With the amount of utter trash that modern Hollywood puts out, combined with the Oscars always feeling like a "pat on the back for rich snobs," I am just genuinely happy to see something like this win anything at all.

Seems like a fluke, though.

I watched Flow in the theater. On the big screen, the less-polished look definitely comes across as an artistic choice, enhancing the otherworldly quality of the world and scenes it depicts. Combined with the great animation of the animals and the audio, you leave the theater in wonder. I suspect the visual roughness becomes more jarring in a less immersive environment.

Honestly yeah it won't be "perfect" but neither is a videogame being rendered in real time and it looks pretty good

Since they're not going crazy with effects it seems like a good compromise

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