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solidangle

578 karma · joined May 9, 2015

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solidangle··on The Singular Mind of Terry Tao
I used Tao's books on Real Analysis during college and my feelings are mixed on his capabilities as an educator. On the one hand his books were really great as he gave a lot of proofs (although most proofs were still left to the reader, but I guess that you can't really learn Analysis without proving Rolle's Theorem or the First Theorem of Calculus on your own) and what I also really liked was that he made no assumptions about your knowledge and started from scratch (first set theory, then properties of natural, whole and rational numbers before constructing the real numbers using Cauchy sequences). On the other hand there were a lot of errors in his books and sometimes he is hard to follow, I guess the books contents are too easy for him and he wrote the book without ever reading back. Even though his books weren't perfect I learned so much about pure mathematics as a non-math major and I don't think I could have learned so much through Rudin's books.
solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
Yeah, such profiles can certainly be used for skin rendering. I know that SPI used the method you mentioned on a few movies. There will be visible flaws though. The skin and especially the lips will look too waxy when using gaussians or bicubics. Weta Digital used Quantized Diffusion on Promotheus for this reason [1]. Pixar has an upcoming talk on a simple, yet highly accurate BSSRDF profile this SIGGRAPH, so let's hope the folks at Blender will implement that in Cycles.

[1] http://www.fxguide.com/featured/prometheus-rebuilding-hallow...

solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
Nope, sadly not. This username was one of the few computer graphics related usernames left on reddit and solid angle sampling is so much cooler than area sampling. You're not only person who thought this, so it's probably about time that I switch to a different username. I'm also a big fan of their work, though, I would love to work for that company once I'm done with university.

Btw, I also really enjoy reading your blog, keep up the good work. Looking forward to the day that you release the source of your renderer.

solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
This is already happening:

- Sony Pictures Imageworks open sourced Open Shading Language, Field3D, Alembic and OpenColorIO.

- Pixar opensourced OpenSubDiv

- Disney opensourced Ptex, BRDF Explorer, SeExpr and Partio

- Dreamworks open sourced OpenVDB

I wouldn't be too suprised if we would see an open source renderer within the next 10 years, especially if SPI is going to replace their in-house version of the Arnold renderer, as open source software has been extremely successful for SPI.

solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
AFAIK Industrial Light and Magic used Arnold for a lot of movies, Framestore used Arnold for Gravity (I'm not sure what they use now), Double Negative uses a whole range of renderers (with layer between their OSL shaders and the renderers) and Weta uses their own in-house renderer Manuka now. Most studios switched away from Renderman as its support for ray tracing was extremely lacking until a year ago. On your list of points:

* Bidirectional path tracing and VCM, surely is nice, but you're absolutely fine with just path tracing. Artists have learned how do to avoid SDS paths and how to optimize their scenes for path tracing. It would require a lot of time to train artists to optimize their scenes for VCM and with the amount of diffuse noise (which is unavoidable) I'm not even sure if it's worth it.

* I doubt the subsurface scattering in Cycles is slower than Renderman as it only supports bicubic and gaussian profiles which are even easier to evaluate and sample than the approximate BSSRDF ;). Their profiles are extremely lacking (and I doubt it's enough these days), but SPI used bicubics and gaussians a few years ago [1].

* I absolutely can't imagine that Cycles doesn't have Environment Map sampling, which is something pretty basic and explained in PBRT. Sure, Cycles probably doesn't have an implementation of "Portal-Masked Environment Map Sampling" by Bitterli, Novak and Jarosz yet, so I'm sure Renderman is better at it, but Cycles is decent at it.

* Same for arbitrary geometry lights, but I'm sure Renderman does a better job at it (although Pixar is probably limited by Solid Angle's patents on importance sampling quads and other stuff, Cycles doesn't have to deal with patents).

* AFAIK Cycles has a state of the art hair shader, but it seems to lack the importance sampling scheme by Eugene d'Eon.

I absolutely agree with you that Renderman is a more complete and faster renderer, but Cycles is absolutely amazing if you keep in mind that it was completely developed by a small team of hobbyists. Cycles isn't meant for production rendering, but it's amazing for hobbyists.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2504520

solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
Most of those shaders written back then are pretty much worthless now that Renderman has introduced RIS mode (instead of REYES mode), which was introduced last year. Pixar recommends writing shaders in C++ now instead of in RSL, as C++ shaders are just way more performant right now. OSL is pretty mature, I know that both Sony Pictures Imageworks and Double Negative use it in production. Now that Renderman also support OSL I'm pretty sure we're going to see OSL examples posted online. OSL shaders are awesome compared to RSL shaders, as OSL gives all control to the renderer, which allows it to do a lot of optimization (such as using the renderers own importance sampling strategies).
solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
I'm pretty sure you can't.

Let's say you want to render realistic skin using Cycles. You can't, the only BSSRDF profiles that Cycles offer are simple bicubic and gaussian profiles, these wouldn't work for rendering realistic skin. Cycles doesn't even offer a simple dipole. Renderman on the other hand offers a dipole, it offers the state of the Photon Beam Diffusion, it offers Pixar's recent approximate BSSRDF, which is almost as accurate as PBD and is as easy to compute as a gaussian or a bicubic profile. So you'd have to implement your own BSSRDF shader, which is only doable for large studios such as Weta which have their own R&D department.

So let's say you want to render hair. You can do this with Cycles, but their importance sampling code is not state of the art (last time I checked), which means that you can probably expect double the amount of noise in Cycles. You could still use this for rendering, but computing time is quite limited (especially if artists want to compute previews). You'd either have to implement your own hair shader, or you'd have to purchase a ton of extra hardware.

Let's say you want to render a scene with tons of triangles and textures, you probably won't be able to do that in Cycles. They don't use special tricks for quantizing those triangles in the memory. Their code for caching textures (sometimes multiple terabytes for a single scene), is also not as good as Renderman, especially when using the GPU (a GPU isn't very good at constantly streaming terabytes of data into it), which means that your texture date either needs to be limited, or you'd need to throw a lot of rendering machines at it.

Cycles can do most stuff that Renderman (or Arnold) can, but that's not the point. If you'd pay me to work on a renderer for you fulltime for a year, I could produce a feature complete renderer, but it won't be optimized. The code won't be optimized, but probably more importantly the ray intersection code and the importance sampling code won't be optimized, which means that renders will be slow and noisy. Pixar has a whole team working on optimizing their code and whole team of researchers working on improving the importance sampling. Cycles is made by hobbyists who are doing an excellent job (Cycles is an amazing renderer for amateur users), but it's just not in the same ballpark as Renderman or Arnold.

Cycles is an absolutely amazing renderer, but it just lacks a lot of stuff that you'd during production of feature movies. If you want to use Cycles for your own use I can absolutely recommend it, it will have everything you need and it's open source!

solidangle··on Intro to RenderMan for Blender
If you're interested in writing a renderer yourself (which is obviously way cooler than using some tools), I'd recommend first picking up either "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics" by Shirley and Marschner or "Computer Graphics: Principles & Practices" by Foley and Van Dam. Once you understand the basics of computer graphics and especially of shading and ray tracing, I'd recommend picking up "Physically Based Rendering: From theory to implementation" by Pharr and Humphreys which is an excellent book that explains the State of the Art of photorealistic rendering. Once you understand how physically based rendering, path tracing, BSDFs and all that good stuff works you're ready to write your own rendering (or to implement a new SIGGRAPH paper in the framework provided by the book). It's a lot of fun writing your own renderer and you'll produce some beautiful pictures.
solidangle··on Floyd–Hoare logic
Coming from the land of Dijkstra (the Netherlands), I was taught about this in college and it was very cool to use this to prove that post-conditions of a function are actually true (although finding good loop invariants was sometimes a bit annoying.

Denotational semantics are horrible in my opinion, but I really like operational semantics (especially structural operational semantics and natural semantics), they still consider a program as a single mathematical object, but like Hoare logic it also tracks the state before and after each statement. It's really easy to work to with (just apply rules), but sadly it's a bit less powerful than Hoare logic, as you can't infer things that hold in general, you can only reason about specific begin states.

solidangle··on How misbehaving at school made one man a multimillionaire
And sadly I get redirected to some sinoadv scam sometimes when I visit imgur on my phone or tablet (adblocked them on my PC until they fix this). I'm sure they're much more careful when selling ad space in the US, but they're doing a horrible job outside the US.
solidangle··on Computational Hydrographic Printing [video]
If anyone is interested in the other papers that are presented at SIGGRAPH 2015, Ke-Sen Huang usually has a complete list with links to preprints and videos. You can find the list for SIGGRAPH 2015 here:

http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2015.html

My favorite paper this year is "The SGGX Microflake Distribution" by E. Heitz et al. Sadly there aren't many papers on rendering this year.

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