FXGuide.com - "The Art of Rendering" article

[Rork]

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-art-of-rendering/

Enjoy a long and interesting read

rob

[BenR]

Wow rob, thanks for linking that article!

Brief outline:
Review of rendering methods and techniques.
Very long section on PRMan.
Very long section on Arnold.
Short sections on the other popular renderers.

Ben

[Kzin]

its a bit short when it comes to future techs. especially the photon tech is a dead thing could be wrong in terms of progressive photon mapping, i think this will be the future when it comes to dsd contribution. path tracing could be a dead end in ten years, but i hope they can extend this tech with good caustics support. arnold and renderer like iray will make some scientists to think more about thess problems. would also be interesting which role renderers like maxwell will play (cpu power and tech optimizations in the next 10 years could make the renderer as a standard horse for all tasks). renderman looks best i think, they extend it with real production value from time to time, but bad thing, there is no si version.
anyway, the next years will be interesting in terms of rendering.

[iamVFX]

i hope they can extend this tech with good caustics support

"We haven’t bothered to spend our resources optimizing on caustics. The reason is that the effect is very difficult to render – you need a lot of time and many rays – but honestly for film and animation production nobody needs it. Well, I mean to say, in my 15 years in production there has not been a single film that has requested accurate caustics"

The most coolest caustic effect that I've seen was the real one

[Kzin]

i hope they can extend this tech with good caustics support

"We haven’t bothered to spend our resources optimizing on caustics. The reason is that the effect is very difficult to render – you need a lot of time and many rays – but honestly for film and animation production nobody needs it. Well, I mean to say, in my 15 years in production there has not been a single film that has requested accurate caustics"

The most coolest caustic effect that I've seen was the real one

i know his statement about it, but it changes in that moment. look at transformers3 or tin tin, they uses caustics for metallic and glas surfaces. i dont know how they archieved it, simple projections (tin tin looks like this) or simple lookups, dont know, but caustics will come in the next couple of years. the easiness use of arnold alone will make the user ask for such a feature, because you can archieve alot of nice shading shading effects very easy in arnold.


the video looks great! would be interesting what kind of caustics they used, how long it rendered if this were rendered caustics.

[iamVFX]

the video looks great! would be interesting what kind of caustics they used, how long it rendered if this were rendered caustics.

That's the point! Caustics was real, filmed on camera. Making of, at 4:30

[Kzin]

the video looks great! would be interesting what kind of caustics they used, how long it rendered if this were rendered caustics.

That's the point! Caustics was real, filmed on camera. Making of, at 4:30

ok, this make clear why the caustics looks that complex, nice.

[Tekano]

any caustics that Ive had to provide over the last 10 years or so were made with a texture projected through a spotlight using a caustic texture rendered using a free program. loopable, tileable and realtime render. very similar to this http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/

[Kzin]

any caustics that Ive had to provide over the last 10 years or so were made with a texture projected through a spotlight using a caustic texture rendered using a free program. loopable, tileable and realtime render. very similar to this http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/

right, i did the same besides some renderfun.
but the rendereffects will be more unified, less local tweaking for certain effects and more like maxwell but with aov support and much more control. and thru this it will make sense to render caustics because you will get them for "free" in terms of rendering in the future.