![]() Visualization professionals need to take massively detailed CAD models from concept through construction with as much visual precision as time and budget will allow. Marcos Fajardo has been developing Arnold for 13 years, carefully tuning its algorithms for speed and performance suitable for demanding offline film production, which Sony Pictures Imageworks used to render Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Path tracing is a type of ray tracing that is typically thought of as the most physically accurate rendering method, but it also has the reputation of being the slowest. The Arnold Renderer by Solid Angle SL uses path tracing to achieve incredible realism. The innovative 3D modeling and rendering software has been delivering fast ray-tracing-based rendering since 2006, when the Modo offline renderer and preview renderers were introduced. The industry standard for ray tracing may be Pixar’s RenderMan, but Luxology , developers of the award-winning Modo software, is no stranger to writing highly efficient code that’s optimized for maximum performance on Windows and Mac computers. The ever-increasing capabilities and performance of multicore, multithreaded processing from both Intel and AMD provide an optimal foundation for a wealth of software innovations and rendering improvements for artists and designers, including these tools: While artists and designers rarely have to think about the code that enables their digital content creation tools, they reap the rewards of well-crafted code optimized to take advantage of the breakthrough performance offered by both Intel Xeon processor-based and AMD Opteron processor-based workstations and servers. High-performance Processors Promote Speed, Complexity and Quality Greater complexity usually equates with larger file sizes and heavier throughput computing workloads, because many rendering algorithms perform best when the entire scene file fits into physical memory, and main-memory-to-internal-memory transfers represent a critical performance bottleneck. Whether the goal is to achieve physical accuracy for things like medical imaging or product design, or to enhance reality for the sake of getting audiences to suspend disbelief as a story unfolds onscreen, the level of visual complexity is usually a balance between time, budget and hardware resources. Modern production rendering, however, is anything but basic - motion blur, depth of field, deep shadows, subsurface scattering, color bleeding and caustics are just some of the myriad optical effects that can be simulated using one or more rendering methods. Color and surface properties are computed by shaders, which commonly reference or sample texture maps. At a basic level, renderers generally compute the visible geometry in a scene as triangles - and paint them onto the virtual screen. Most popular rendering methods - rasterization, ray tracing, ray casting and so on - simulate light moving through a scene (also known as “light transport”) to produce photorealistic imagery or stylized non-photorealistic looks. All these accomplishments are made possibly by multicore, multi-threaded processors, including Intel’s Xeon and Core i7 processors and AMD’s Opteron and Phenom processors. The ability to render highly precise, photorealistic product designs and large-scale architectural plans, including exterior and interior walkthroughs, helps speed time to market. In the design visualization world, no detail is too small to leave to the imagination, and the demand for high-quality visualization continues to grow in direct proportion to client expectations. ![]() Rendering times ranged from 30 to 100 hours per frame. ![]() And James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar features animation and effects produced by WETA using a server farm of 4,000 blade servers hosting 40,000 processor cores. ![]() ![]() Ratatouille , released by Pixar Animation Studios in 2007, was rendered on an arsenal of 850 computer servers, which housed nearly 3,200 processors. It reportedly took about four hours to render a single frame of Gollum . By the end of the trilogy, WETA, the visual effects firm, had upgraded its render farm to 3,200 processors. The production rendering for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003) combined live action and highly realistic virtual characters. Look at some popular CG- and visual-effects-intensive films released over the last 10 years. Evermore complex rendering algorithms deliver increasing levels of visual subtlety and devour advances in processing power as quickly as they become available. While production times might be expected to decrease in direct proportion to available processing power, the ambitions of creative professionals are outpacing Moore’s law, which says that transistor density will double approximately every two years. ![]()
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