Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6960
The Rendering Revolution: A Desired Disruption T oday it can take hundreds of minutes to compute a single HD- resolution, photoreal image or animation frame using a typical workstation and existing software renderers. In many cases, it might even take several minutes before there is the slightest indication that something isn't right in the image, forcing the whole process to start over. Artists rarely render just once to get a final result; instead, they render 10 or even 100 times to get the look they're searching for. As such, long render times and delayed feedback have a large impact on both the creative process and the cost of producing a photoreal image. Customers overcome these limitations by building large, dedi- cated, rendering farms, with potentially hundreds or even thousands of computing nodes, to create a more responsive and interactive solution, or to meet deadlines. But, what if you could generate photoreal image quality in under a minute? What if you could render a finished frame of an animation in seconds—perhaps of a lesser quality, but still good enough for most purposes? Disruption occurs in any technological field when a 10x or better improvement occurs to an existing process. So, if an artist could iterate in "human time"—with the creative feedback loop measured in seconds or a fraction of seconds and entire animated sequences pro- duced in minutes—then a rush of new business models and applica- tions could open up for artists using the disruptive technology. We're on the cusp of something like this happening with rendering. Here at Autodesk, we're calling it the "Rendering Revolution." Under the Hood e technology underpinning the Rendering Revolution is twofold. First, CPU cores have multiplied in workstations, with eight cores now available for less than $2000. Second, a dramatic increase in the computing capabilities of GPUs during the past couple of years has finally made it practical to move some of the compute-intensive calculations required for raytracing to the GPU, which is looking more and more like a supercomputer on a chip. Also, many of the shading and lighting effects found in a traditional software renderer can now be delivered through GPU techniques. Witness the quality of recent game titles that leverage state-of-the-art game engines to produce images that are increasingly close to photoreal. While these im- ages may not always be physically accurate, they can often be good enough for those who do not require ultimate pixel fidelity from their rendering. ese two factors have driven a myriad of interactive or progressive rendering solutions to market and to trade-show floors as technology demonstrations. Layered on top of the new hardware are sophisticated software algo- rithms that scale almost linearly with the increase in hardware resources. Using 16 cores is practically twice as fast as using eight cores, and adding a second GPU can almost double the performance of the single GPU solution. When you couple this with advancements in virtualization and cloud computing, you approach a point where you can instantly scale your rendering resources according to deadlines and other require- ments. No longer is a dedicated renderfarm an absolute requirement to get results quickly. Along with the availability of computing resources, a lot of attention is being paid to the process of locking in the finished look and making decisions around materials, lights, and cameras that drive the creative value of the image. New progressive rendering solutions enhance the it- erative experience to accelerate these creative decisions. Instead of wait- ing for part of the image to be rendered, the entire image is progressively rendered at an increasing resolution, morphing from grainy to photo- real—akin to watching the image of a Polaroid instant film develop. While the time it takes to get a finished image may not change much, the fact that critical creative decisions can now be made in the first Rendering By Ken Pimentel Caustic Graphics illustrates the result of integrating Brazil RT with 3ds Max, using the CausticOne rendering accelerator. February 2010 Ken Pimentel is director of the Visual Communication Group at Autodesk.