From Pixels to Reality – Thoughts on Next Game Engine
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The Uses of Animation 1
The Uses of Animation 1 1 The Uses of Animation ANIMATION Animation is the process of making the illusion of motion and change by means of the rapid display of a sequence of static images that minimally differ from each other. The illusion—as in motion pictures in general—is thought to rely on the phi phenomenon. Animators are artists who specialize in the creation of animation. Animation can be recorded with either analogue media, a flip book, motion picture film, video tape,digital media, including formats with animated GIF, Flash animation and digital video. To display animation, a digital camera, computer, or projector are used along with new technologies that are produced. Animation creation methods include the traditional animation creation method and those involving stop motion animation of two and three-dimensional objects, paper cutouts, puppets and clay figures. Images are displayed in a rapid succession, usually 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second. THE MOST COMMON USES OF ANIMATION Cartoons The most common use of animation, and perhaps the origin of it, is cartoons. Cartoons appear all the time on television and the cinema and can be used for entertainment, advertising, 2 Aspects of Animation: Steps to Learn Animated Cartoons presentations and many more applications that are only limited by the imagination of the designer. The most important factor about making cartoons on a computer is reusability and flexibility. The system that will actually do the animation needs to be such that all the actions that are going to be performed can be repeated easily, without much fuss from the side of the animator. -
An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering
RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering PER CHRISTENSEN, JULIAN FONG, JONATHAN SHADE, WAYNE WOOTEN, BRENDEN SCHUBERT, ANDREW KENSLER, STEPHEN FRIEDMAN, CHARLIE KILPATRICK, CLIFF RAMSHAW, MARC BAN- NISTER, BRENTON RAYNER, JONATHAN BROUILLAT, and MAX LIANI, Pixar Animation Studios Fig. 1. Path-traced images rendered with RenderMan: Dory and Hank from Finding Dory (© 2016 Disney•Pixar). McQueen’s crash in Cars 3 (© 2017 Disney•Pixar). Shere Khan from Disney’s The Jungle Book (© 2016 Disney). A destroyer and the Death Star from Lucasfilm’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (© & ™ 2016 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization.) Pixar’s RenderMan renderer is used to render all of Pixar’s films, and by many 1 INTRODUCTION film studios to render visual effects for live-action movies. RenderMan started Pixar’s movies and short films are all rendered with RenderMan. as a scanline renderer based on the Reyes algorithm, and was extended over The first computer-generated (CG) animated feature film, Toy Story, the years with ray tracing and several global illumination algorithms. was rendered with an early version of RenderMan in 1995. The most This paper describes the modern version of RenderMan, a new architec- ture for an extensible and programmable path tracer with many features recent Pixar movies – Finding Dory, Cars 3, and Coco – were rendered that are essential to handle the fiercely complex scenes in movie production. using RenderMan’s modern path tracing architecture. The two left Users can write their own materials using a bxdf interface, and their own images in Figure 1 show high-quality rendering of two challenging light transport algorithms using an integrator interface – or they can use the CG movie scenes with many bounces of specular reflections and materials and light transport algorithms provided with RenderMan. -
Deep Compositing Using Lie Algebras
Deep Compositing Using Lie Algebras TOM DUFF Pixar Animation Studios Deep compositing is an important practical tool in creating digital imagery, Deep images extend Porter-Duff compositing by storing multiple but there has been little theoretical analysis of the underlying mathematical values at each pixel with depth information to determine composit- operators. Motivated by finding a simple formulation of the merging oper- ing order. The OpenEXR deep image representation stores, for each ation on OpenEXR-style deep images, we show that the Porter-Duff over pixel, a list of nonoverlapping depth intervals, each containing a function is the operator of a Lie group. In its corresponding Lie algebra, the single pixel value [Kainz 2013]. An interval in a deep pixel can splitting and mixing functions that OpenEXR deep merging requires have a represent contributions either by hard surfaces if the interval has particularly simple form. Working in the Lie algebra, we present a novel, zero extent or by volumetric objects when the interval has nonzero simple proof of the uniqueness of the mixing function. extent. Displaying a single deep image requires compositing all the The Lie group structure has many more applications, including new, values in each deep pixel in depth order. When two deep images correct resampling algorithms for volumetric images with alpha channels, are merged, splitting and mixing of these intervals are necessary, as and a deep image compression technique that outperforms that of OpenEXR. described in the following paragraphs. 26 r Merging the pixels of two deep images requires that correspond- CCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Antialiasing; Visibility; ing pixels of the two images be reconciled so that all overlapping Image processing; intervals are identical in extent. -
Loren Carpenter, Inventor and President of Cinematrix, Is a Pioneer in the Field of Computer Graphics
Loren Carpenter BIO February 1994 Loren Carpenter, inventor and President of Cinematrix, is a pioneer in the field of computer graphics. He received his formal education in computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. From 1966 to 1980 he was employed by The Boeing Company in a variety of capacities, primarily software engineering and research. While there, he advanced the state of the art in image synthesis with now standard algorithms for synthesizing images of sculpted surfaces and fractal geometry. His 1980 film Vol Libre, the world’s first fractal movie, received much acclaim along with employment possibilities countrywide. He chose Lucasfilm. His fractal technique and others were usedGenesis in the sequence Starin Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was such a popular sequence that Paramount used it in most of the other Star Trek movies. The Lucasfilm computer division produced sequences for several movies:Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Young Sherlock Holmes, andReturn of the Jedl, plus several animated short films. In 1986, the group spun off to form its own business, Pixar. Loren continues to be Senior Scientist for the company, solving interesting problems and generally improving the state of the art. Pixar is now producing the first completely computer animated feature length motion picture with the support of Disney, a logical step after winning the Academy Award for best animatedTin short Toy for in 1989. In 1993, Loren received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for his fundamental contributions to the motion picture industry through the invention and development of the RenderMan image synthesis software system. -
Press Release
Press release CaixaForum Madrid From 21 March to 22 June 2014 Press release CaixaForum Madrid hosts the first presentation in Spain of a show devoted to the history of a studio that revolutionised the world of animated film “The art challenges the technology. Technology inspires the art.” That is how John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Pixar Animation Studios, sums up the spirit of the US company that marked a turning-point in the film world with its innovations in computer animation. This is a medium that is at once extraordinarily liberating and extraordinarily challenging, since everything, down to the smallest detail, must be created from nothing. Pixar: 25 Years of Animation casts its spotlight on the challenges posed by computer animation, based on some of the most memorable films created by the studio. Taking three key elements in the creation of animated films –the characters, the stories and the worlds that are created– the exhibition reveals the entire production process, from initial idea to the creation of worlds full of sounds, textures, music and light. Pixar: 25 Years of Animation traces the company’s most outstanding technical and artistic achievements since its first shorts in the 1980s, whilst also enabling visitors to discover more about the production process behind the first 12 Pixar feature films through 402 pieces, including drawings, “colorscripts”, models, videos and installations. Pixar: 25 Years of Animation . Organised and produced by : Pixar Animation Studios in cooperation with ”la Caixa” Foundation. Curator : Elyse Klaidman, Director, Pixar University and Archive at Pixar Animation Studios. Place : CaixaForum Madrid (Paseo del Prado, 36). -
King's Research Portal
King’s Research Portal DOI: 10.1386/ap3.4.1.67_1 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Holliday, C. (2014). Notes on a Luxo world. Animation Practice, Process & Production, 67-95. https://doi.org/10.1386/ap3.4.1.67_1 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognize and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. •Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. •You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain •You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. -
DROIDMAKER George Lucas and the Digital Revolution
An exclusive excerpt from... DROIDMAKER George Lucas and the Digital Revolution Michael Rubin Triad Publishing Company Gainesville, Florida Copyright © 2006 by Michael Rubin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. For information on permission for reprints and excerpts, contact Triad Publishing Company: PO Box 13355, Gainesville, FL 32604 http://www.triadpublishing.com To report errors, please email: [email protected] Trademarks Throughout this book trademarked names are used. Rather than put a trademark symbol in every occurrence of a trademarked name, we state we are using the names in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rubin, Michael. Droidmaker : George Lucas and the digital revolution / Michael Rubin.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-937404-67-6 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 0-937404-67-5 (hardcover) 1. Lucas, George, 1944—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Lucasfilm, Ltd. Computer Division — History. I. Title. PN1998.3.L835R83 2005 791.4302’33’092—dc22 2005019257 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in the United States of America Contents Author’s Introduction: High Magic. vii Act One 1 The Mythology of George. .3 2 Road Trip . .19 3 The Restoration. 41 4 The Star Wars. 55 5 The Rebirth of Lucasfilm . 75 6 The Godfather of Electronic Cinema. .93 Act Two 7 The Visionary on Long Island. -
A Shading Reuse Method for Efficient Micropolygon Ray Tracing • 151:3
A Shading Reuse Method for Efficient Micropolygon Ray Tracing Qiming Hou Kun Zhou State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University∗ Abstract We present a shading reuse method for micropolygon ray trac- ing. Unlike previous shading reuse methods that require an ex- plicit object-to-image space mapping for shading density estima- tion or shading accuracy, our method performs shading density con- trol and actual shading reuse in different spaces with uncorrelated criterions. Specifically, we generate the shading points by shoot- ing a user-controlled number of shading rays from the image space, while the evaluated shading values are assigned to antialiasing sam- ples through object-space nearest neighbor searches. Shading sam- ples are generated in separate layers corresponding to first bounce ray paths to reduce spurious reuse from very different ray paths. This method eliminates the necessity of an explicit object-to-image space mapping, enabling the elegant handling of ray tracing effects Figure 1: An animated scene rendered with motion blur and re- such as reflection and refraction. The overhead of our shading reuse flection. This scene contains 1.56M primitives and is rendered with operations is minimized by a highly parallel implementation on the 2 reflective bounces at 1920 × 1080 resolution and 11 × 11 su- GPU. Compared to the state-of-the-art micropolygon ray tracing al- persampling. The total render time is 289 seconds. On average gorithm, our method is able to reduce the required shading evalua- only 3.48 shading evaluations are performed for each pixel and are tions by an order of magnitude and achieve significant performance reused for other samples. -
Real-Time Patch-Based Sort-Middle Rendering on Massively Parallel
Real-Time Patch-Based Sort-Middle Rendering on Massively Parallel Hardware Charles Loop1 and Christian Eisenacher2 1Microsoft Research 2University of Erlangen-Nuremberg May 2009 Technical Report MSR-TR-2009-83 Recently, sort-middle triangle rasterization, implemented as software on a manycore GPU with vector units (Larabee), has been proposed as an alternative to hardware rasterization. The main reasoning is, that only a fraction of the time per frame is spent sorting and raster- izing triangles. However is this still a valid argument in the context of geometry amplification when the number of primitives increases quickly? A REYES like approach, sorting parametric patches in- stead, could avoid many of the problems with tiny triangles. To demonstrate that software rasterization with geometry amplifica- tion can work in real-time, we implement a tile based sort-middle rasterizer in CUDA and analyze its behavior: First we adaptively subdivide rational bicubic B´ezier patches. Then we sort those into buckets, and for each bucket we dice, grid-shade, and rasterize the micropolygons into the corresponding tile using on-chip caches. De- spite being limited by the amount of available shared memory, the number of registers and the lack of an L3 cache, we manage to ras- terize 1600 × 1200 images, containing 200k sub-patches, at 10-12 fps on an nVidia GTX 280. This is about 3x to 5x slower than a hybrid approach subdividing with CUDA and using the HW rasterizer. We hide cracks caused by adaptive subdivision using a flatness metric in combination with rasterizing B´ezier convex hulls. Using a k-buffer with a fuzzy z-test we can render transparent objects despite the overlap our approach creates. -
Computer Graphics on a Stream Architecture
COMPUTER GRAPHICS ON A STREAM ARCHITECTURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY John Douglas Owens November 2002 c Copyright by John Douglas Owens 2003 All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opin- ion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. William J. Dally (Principal Adviser) I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opin- ion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Patrick Hanrahan I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opin- ion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Matthew Regan Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Stud- ies: iii Abstract Media applications, such as signal processing, image and video processing, and graphics, are an increasing and important part of the way people use computers today. However, modern microprocessors cannot provide the performance necessary to meet the demands of these media applications, and special purpose processors lack the flexibility and pro- grammability necessary to address the wide variety of media applications. For the proces- sors of the future, we must design and implement architectures and programming models that meet the performance and flexibility requirements of these applications. Streams are a powerful programming abstraction suitable for efficiently implement- ing complex and high-performance media applications. -
High Dynamic Range Image Encodings Introduction
High Dynamic Range Image Encodings Greg Ward, Anyhere Software Introduction We stand on the threshold of a new era in digital imaging, when image files will encode the color gamut and dynamic range of the original scene, rather than the limited subspace that can be conveniently displayed with 20 year-old monitor technology. In order to accomplish this goal, we need to agree upon a standard encoding for high dynamic range (HDR) image information. Paralleling conventional image formats, there are many HDR standards to choose from. This chapter covers some of the history, capabilities, and future of existing and emerging standards for encoding HDR images. We focus here on the bit encodings for each pixel, as opposed to the file wrappers used to store entire images. This is to avoid confusing color space quantization and image compression, which are, to some extent, separable issues. We have plenty to talk about without getting into the details of discrete cosine transforms, wavelets, and entropy encoding. Specifically, we want to answer some basic questions about HDR color encodings and their uses. What Is a Color Space, Exactly? In very simple terms, the human visual system has three different types of color-sensing cells in the eye, each with different spectral sensitivities. (Actually, there are four types of retinal cells, but the “rods” do not seem to affect our sensation of color – only the “cones.” The cells are named after their basic shapes.) Monochromatic light, as from a laser, will stimulate these three cell types in proportion to their sensitivities at the source wavelength. -
The Renderman Interface Specification, V3.1
The RenderMan Interface Version 3.1 September 1989 (with typographical corrections through May 1995) Copyright 1987, 1988, 1989, 1995 Pixar. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other- wise, without the prior permission of Pixar. The information in this publication is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Pixar. Pixar as- sumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this publication. RenderMan is a registered trademark of Pixar. Pixar 1001 W. Cutting Blvd. Richmond, CA 94804 (510) 236-4000 Fax: (510) 236-0388 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ................................................................................................. vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................... viii PREFACE ............................................................................................................................ ix Part I The RenderMan Interface Section 1 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 3 Features and Capabilities ....................................................................................................... 5 Required features ............................................................................................................