My Background Technical Director Pixar Films Cars Ratatouille
My Background Technical Director, Pixar Films: Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up Shading & Tech Neon shading and LOD (Cars) Set and prop shading (Cars) Crowd Shading/Rendering Pipeline (Wall-E) Render Optimization Illumination baking tech, brickmaps (Cars) Hair Rendering Optimization (Rat) Crowd Rendering Optimization (Wall-E) Student, University of Pennsylvania Digital Media Design Major Research Assistant, Human Modeling and Simulation Lab Massive brain development, pipeline, and shot work (Rat, Wall-E, Up) Rendering Cloth Simulation for Post Doc Worked on art for paper submissions Graphics Programming, Color Perception Lab Crowd Simulation CS, Math, and Art training Hyperspectral rendering pipeline for psychophysics experiments (Radiance, Renderman, and Matlab) Siggraph Chapter Worked on 3 D animations after class
Lesson Overview What is Render. Man? Animated Shading Goal: animating ripening/aging fruit Proceduralism and its advantages Example: Chipped Paint & Rusted Metal Demonstration: Aging Orange Procedural Pattern Making Creating patterns with fractals Example: Adding dirt to the Orange
What is Render. Man ? Render. Man™ is a 3 D scene description language published and owned by PIXAR Animation Studios. It subdivides into two areas: The Ri API or RIB The Render. Man™ Shading Language (RSL). Render. Man is NOT a renderer, it is published standard for renderer’s to adhere to. (e. g. Pixie is a Render. Man renderer. )
Render. Man Concept [ Saty Raghavachary]
What Render. Man renderers are there? Photo Realistic Render. Man™ – Pixar – Win, Linux, Irix, Mac OSX - $3500 Render. Dot. C – Dot. C Software – Win, Linux, Irix, HP-UX - $ 595 to $2995 Air – Sitex Graphics www. sitexgraphics. com Win –Linux - $450. 3 Delight – Win – Linux - Mac OSX – $ 1, 000 (First license is free) Aqsis – Open Source -Win – Linux - Mac OSX - Free Pixie – Open Source (by Okan Arikan) -Win – Linux - Mac OSX - Free JRMan – Open Source - Free
Pixar’s Photorealistic Render. Man We will focus on the Pixar Photorealistic Render. Man implementation (PRMan), and Pixar’s support software: Render. Man Studio (RMS).
Pixar’s Render. Man Products Render. Man for Maya™ ($995) Render. Man Studio™ ($2, 000 - 3500) A Maya plug-in that directly renders Maya scenes using PRMan (much like the Mental Ray or Maxwell plugins). This product is very easy to learn, but lacks the flexibility and full features of pure PRMan (great for small studios, but not larger productions). A suite of tools that provide a customizable render pipeline between Maya and PRMan. These tools are very flexible and allow access to all of PRMan’s features (great for small to large studios) Render. Man Pro Server™ ($3, 500) Pure PRMan. It is up to the studio / individual to figure out how to translate their scenes to RIB/RSL (great for medium to large studios). This is all a renderfarm machine needs.
PRMan History PRMan was developed by the Computer Graphics Research Group at Lucasfilm (now Pixar) in the mid 80’s. PRMan is an implementation of the Reyes rendering algorithm [Cook et al. SIGGRAPH 1987]. Designed for movie special effects and thus had to meet the following criteria: Extreme visual complexity (hundreds of light sources, millions of polygons, gigabytes of textures). Seamless integration with live action footage (accurate motion blur / depth of field). Speed and memory efficient (developed in the 80’s, but still necessary) History of success, 41 out of the last 44 oscar nominee’s for Best Visual Effects have used PRMan In 1993, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored the developers of Render. Man with a Scientific and Engineering Achievement Award for their contribution to the motion picture industry.
PRMan History Render. Man has been used in a ton of movies. Here's a list: [ Saty Raghavachary]
PRMan History What makes Render. Man great? Four things: 1. awesome image quality 2. excellent performance (speed, stability) 3. vast feature set 4. powerful customizability (via shading language, procedural plugins, output drivers. . ) [ Saty Raghavachary]
Proceduralism In computer graphics, “proceduralism” refers to the practice of creating imagery using algorithmic methods rather than solely using stored data from direct artistic input. In other words, creating art using a recipe, rather than a paint brush or mouse. Examples: Writing a script to generate a model of a plant rather than modeling it by hand. Creating a shading network to combine patterns and images to generate a texture rather than painting it by hand. [http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Procedural_generation]
Pro’s & Con’s of Proceduralism PRO’s Detail, procedures can create patterns at any scale without repetition. Variety, many variations of the same “look” can be created by a single procedure. Efficiency, a procedure can often create detail using far less memory than if the detail were stored directly. CON’s Difficulty, procedural techniques often have a steeper learning curve than more direct methods. Slowness, a procedure may require more calculations than simply reading stored data. Fragility, complicated procedures may leave more room for errors and painful debugging.
An application: Ripening Fruit! Since the fruit and vegetable shaders we are creating for the first assignment are procedural, we can create animation by changing the input parameters to our procedure over time. We will see how to use our shaders to create to impression of “ripening”.
Application: Aged Materials • Procedural techniques like aging can apply to many inorganic materials as well: – – – – Dust Rust Chipped Paint Dirt Concrete Brick Metal
Aged Materials
Aging Demonstration
Dust Example
Full Shading Network
Full Shading Network
Types of Patterns • Procedural: Fractal Noise (slim template) – Pro: Non-periodic & Seamless – Pro: Infinite level of detail – Con: Limited expressiveness • Photographs: Texture CD’s – Pro: Physically accurate – Con: Limited detail, periodic. – Con: Difficult to edit • Generated: Texture Generation (Photoshop Eye Candy, Filter Forge, etc. ) – Pro: Tiling, virtually non-periodic – Pro: More possibilities than noise. – Con: Not as accurate as photographs
Application: An Alley
Application: An Alley
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