RenderMan Price Restructuring
renderman.pixar.com
renderman.pixar.com
The current popular actively developed ones are: V-Ray (which we use in http://Clara.io), Arnold, Maxwell, Pixar's RenderMan, and KeyShot.
Less popular but actively developed ones are: RedShift, Furry Ball, 3Delight, NVIDIA iRay, Octane/Bridge...
And then the ones that are integrated into the 3D packages themselves like Blender's Cycles, Modo's renderer, Cinema 4D's renderer, Houdini's Mantra, Mental Images (included in most Autodesk products.)
Then the smaller opensource ones: Sunflow, Lux, Corona, Mitsuba, Pixie...
That is a lot of renderers and I am sure that I am missing quite a few.
A similar current company is http://ZyncRender.com, although even today with great bandwidth, cheap cloud computing, and an amazing sync system, they still found it a hard market to crack.
While I am programmer, my first love was animation. I had done some cluster computing with thought experiments around huge render farms. When screamline came online a bunch of years later it caught my attention immensely. What a perfect combination of the both!
Aside: I tried doing EC2 type stuff in 1999-2001, it was really hard, too much resistance for running anything "sensitive" in the cloud.
What a great way for Intel to sidestep the artificial scarcity and release cycles to the world instead of chips! They could prototype new hardware, use "crippled" cpus that they couldn't sell, I thought it was a great vertical integration play that sidestepped many of the ridiculous economic factors at the time. Eventually it will get there when we have massive bandwidth, AMD and Intel if they are still around will sell mostly cycles.
I was really bummed to see screamline go out of business. It was like a sad canary.
* 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010722053709/http://www.scream...
Try Screamline Rendering Services and your first 500
frames are on us!
Screamline Rendering Services, provided by Internet
Computing Services, has enjoyed working with our
customers in the computer graphics animation industry to
provide outsourced rendering services.
Due to a deteriorated funding climate for Internet-based
businesses and unfavorable market conditions, Internet
Computing Services, part of the Intel New Business Group,
will exit the outsourced rendering services business,
effective October 31, 2001.I've seem some, like Furry Ball, that support only CUDA, but very few are vendor agnostic with OpenCL. I hope AMD tries to fix this.
- CPU renders typically might use 32Gb memory (or more).
- most rendering is done on a render farm which won't have GPUs (unless you maintain a gnu render farm).
There are good reasons why commercial renderers are avoiding the GPU, at least for now.
In situations where your problem domain doesn't fit comfortably within the memory restrictions of a GPU, or porting a legacy code base difficult, this could be a very interesting option.
It is generally a no go in the mainstream rendering market, although cloud-based renderers can use specialized solutions.
You may be able to accelerate some steps in a GPU, but rendering usually involves "a lot of data", if you add all resources for a given scene it might be on the order of gigabytes
This is not like bitcoin mining where you have to do a lot of math in a small batch of data.
I've also experimented a bit with Lux which has a hybrid CPU/GPU mode. However I've found it isn't necessarily any faster than CPU only on my system (which has a lot of CPU cores) and it isn't as stable.
AFAIK, there are no video cards currently available with more than 6GB per GPU, since something like a nVidia Titan Z with 12GB has to share that between 2 GPUs.
It's conceivable that as GPU rendering becomes more commonplace we'll start to see manufacturers loading more and more RAM only high end cards, possibly at the expense of compute units if power consumption is a problem. After all, a render farm with many separate cards is just as fast as one card with more compute units, but VRAM per GPU is currently a hard limit that will affect anyone rendering very large, complex scenes.
Often scenes can have > 300GB of textures total. Out-of-core rendering is not something that GPU renderers can do very well yet (redshift can do it a bit), so the 12GB limit on GPU memory is a huge problem. Arnold and PRMan both have deferred shading which means for GI they can re-order texture requests for similar texture mipmap levels to reduce the swapping of textures needed. I'm not aware of any GPU renderers that can do that as of yet.
On top of this, geometry assets are always overbuilt these days, with millions of polys/subds, and often multiple displacement layers on top of this. This geometry requires even more memory.
And the biggest studios are rendering deep output, requiring even more memory for the output files as more of the render samples need to be kept in memory for the render duration.
And while GPUs are faster, they're not THAT much faster for raytracing - a Dual Xeon top end CPU can almost (85% of ) match a K6000 at pure ray/triangle intersection speed. Where GPUs can win is the fact it's a lot easier to cram multiple GPUs into a single workstation than get a 4 socket CPU system.
But in a renderfarm, this isn't an issue.
I'm not saying GPU rendering is easy, it's way harder to do correctly because of memory constraints, but the performance of GPUs over CPUs (compute per watt, compute total) is a gap that's only getting wider. It's easy to add a few thousand more shaders, just add another card. Not easy to strap on another 12-core chip, you need to engineer from the ground up for that.
A GPU also has access to all system memory via DMA, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's just going to be hard to coordinate that data transfer in a performant way.
Very little of this is GPU-based currently.
Where GPUs are starting to be used is on the artist workstation to speed up iteration/preview time. But not on renderfarms.
GPU memory access across the PCIE bus is ridiculously slow for smaller jobs. It's often the case that the slower CPU can do the work before the cumulative time of copy data to GPU, get GPU to do work, then copy it back again has been done. For longer jobs of smaller data, GPUs make sense.
GPUs also have much higher power draw than CPUs and produce much more heat, which is a huge issue for renderfarms with close to 100% utilisation at crunch time.
Also its being integrated into other 3d packages like Rhino. src http://www.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/rhin... and http://www.blendernation.com/2014/05/12/developer-meeting-no...
Another integrated renderer is the one is Lightwave. I believe that Blue Sky and Dreamworks still use their own proprietary renderers. Sony is using an Arnold based renderer.
It's possible they were hemorrhaging money thanks to the Arnold and VRay competition over the past few years.
Looks like ILM are being "coerced" into using PRMan again from what I hear...
But either way, it sounds like either they're willing to take a hit on the profits, or they're expecting to make up for it from renderfarm expansions...
An educational license for Adobe Creative Cloud, which covers virtually all of Adobe's products, is $300 a year. I'm sorry, but if you are in art school and can't afford to pay that there is something very, very wrong and it's not with the price. Many schools even have a site license and you only pay a nominal fee or nothing at all for Adobe CC while enrolled.
I think Creative Cloud is cool because it actually makes it reasonable to pay for some Adobe software, and you don't have to sink a bunch of time into cracks, activation workarounds, etc. I don't know if it's going to actually be more profitable for Adobe long-term or not, but as a consumer, I'm excited to see them try something new.
If you wanted to set up an all-free environment to learn, what's the list of software you would use?
http://www.blender.org is the primary desktop open source solution.
YC disciples totally need to Disrupt The Heck Out Of That Niche
Toy Story was very realistic for the time.
And I think people are routinely generating CGI that looks as nice as Toy Story... they just don't have as good a writing, acting, etc.
https://www.renderman-on-demand.com/
Maybe useful if you hit crunch mode, I guess.
The first guy was Ed Catmull in the video. I recognized him but didn't know what to say and he got into some deep discussion with the guy he was with.
I got a job offer from Pixar but turned them down cause my first child was just born and, at the time, I was concerned about Pixar's stability which turned out to be a correct belief back then. Instead, I accepted an offer from Silicon Graphics and sat next to Jim Clark in the lunch room as much as I could.
http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Subdivision_method_3/subdivision-...