4/27/2023 0 Comments Renderman user group siggraph 2013This was coupled with the economics of building GPU farms and more recently even supply-side issues about getting large quantities of chips, has been an issue. “It’s tantalizing right now,” comments Manca, “In the past, if you had a two-gigabyte card, you are not going to be able to do very much in terms of what we would consider production-level complexity, but now the new offerings mean you could put a substantial number of Coco or Toy Story 4 shots onto a GPU.” Thus, the issue has been less about production quality or if Pixar’s RenderMan team could produce a film quality or technical output and more about waiting until the GPUs could support the scale of a shot that is typically required in high-end production. ”It’s not the same as in the REYES days, but if you look at the memory footprints of a modern Pixar film, … the average is starting to fall into line with the very high end of memory that’s available these days,” he adds. Mark Manca, RenderMan product manager points out that from the earlier days RenderMan was designed with a focus on addressing and supporting scene complexity, ”RenderMan from its earliest days back in the eighties, was about scene complexity and being able to scale up to infinite levels of geometric and shader complexity on limited machines.” While the parameters of the problem have changed with the advent of Ray Tracing and modern shaders, there are still definite constraints on solving general rendering on GPUs. They could not even hold the shader cache, and yet the great strides that have been made by hardware vendors on those fronts are amazing.” They were an order of magnitude bigger than what you’d want. And not only that, the production shaders at Pixar work thousands and thousands of lines long. “For years it was that the scene wouldn’t fit in memory. Memory has traditionally been a gating factor for RenderMan. As such Pixar wants a general-purpose solution and one that addresses the needs of its users. The XPU is not just a GPU version of the CPU, it is an integrated hybrid CPU + GPU rendering engine. And it really does let us do a lot more general-purpose things with the hardware than we ever could before.” The RenderMan team has traditionally been able to innovate much faster on the CPU side of the equation due to just the programming environment. “The general programmability of the GPU has come so far, the general CUDA environment makes all the difference in my opinion. He cites firstly what he characterizes as a change in the programming landscape. Why GPU now?ĭavid Laur, Director of Product Management, believes there are several reasons why only now has RenderMan made the move to release the XPU and embrace the GPU. Physically-based materials aid accurate lighting, especially in combination with the new Color Management support for ACES in look development workflows. Unofficially, a sensible-sized GPU for XPU in production would be a 24gigabtye card.Īrtists and TDs can shade objects in the context of their scenes, get approval, and send to RenderMan RIS for a perceptually identical final frame. Given the memory constraints, one is best to use an NVIDIA card with as much memory as possible. Users must have a Maxwell class card or above and be using a recent driver. Unfortunately, this does not run on Mac OSX, the GPU side of XPU only supports NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux and Windows. Until last week XPU was not included in the Non-Commercial RenderMan, but you can currently download a version for the next month that includes a limited duration free evaluation license. ![]() This first phase of XPU is focused on accelerating look development for shading artists. XPU is Pixar’s next-generation hybrid CPU + GPU rendering engine, rewritten for speed and efficiency on film production assets. RenderMan has had many industry-leading best-of-class innovations, but this move to GPU is a major step for the RenderMan team. ![]() ![]() ![]() RenderMan is an Academy Award-winning rendering solution, excelling at producing a stunning range of professional imagery for feature film animation, VFX, and projects. We sat down with the senior RenderMan team to discuss the state of RenderMan’s newest advances and the roadmap looking forward. Version 24 delivers new interactive rendering capability with the first release of RenderMan XPU, as well as new picture-making capabilities with RenderMan’s Stylized Looks. RenderMan version 24 delivers a suite of exceptional tools for advancing look-dev workflows for feature film animation and VFX.
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