And the problem is not just contained to final render time, as Arnold founder Marcos Fajardo pointed out at Siggraph 2010 – final render CPU time might cost $0.10 per hour, but artist time is closer to $40 an hour, so interactivity is also vital.
Production requirements in terms of rendertime and scene complexity are staggering. Arnold, by Solid Angle, is some 200,000 lines of highly optimized C++ code, and it is considered a very direct implementation without a lot of hacks or tricks. Renderers are easy to write in the abstract, as perhaps a university project, but to work in production environments is extremely difficult. Since rendering dominates render farms one cannot devote as much effort to perfect light simulations in a render as you can to a destruction simulation in just perhaps one shot. To me it is the most exciting part of being in our industry right now.”Īs Dana Batali, Vice President of RenderMan products at Pixar commented to fxguide at an earlier Siggraph, “Rendering drives the largest computational budget of getting the pixels to the screen.” He pointed out at that time ‘sims’ (physical sims like cloth etc) were only about 5% of most film’s computation budgets. Rendering is a religion! Especially now in this era, which is really really exciting, there is so much going on and there are so many renderers, so much happening. CG supervisor Scott Metzger jokes that one can’t talk about renderers without annoying someone.
Once considered a commodity item in the whole CG / VFX world – rendering is now a hot topic. Rendering is always an exercise in managing how much computer power you are willing to devote to simulating reality – that cost is expressed in both dollars and time.
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