PIXAR :: Technology Focus

#1

Hi there,

I was very happy when the PIXAR RenderMan team stepped forward to show the CGSociety community the extraordinary advantages of Point-based rendering systems. This was a great opportunity for us to hear from the team with a Scientific and Engineering Academy award.
Click the image to read the article.

#2

Thanks for the article. I’ve yet to read through it all but just wanted to say that formatting the type into columns is not a great way to read things online. For example it’s not clear if the next passage of text is below or to the right of the previous…

#3

Agreed, really difficult to follow

#4

Great articles and makes understanding the technology behind PRman better.

Is it the point-based technique implemented in 3delight too? Or, it is exclusive to PRman.

And, did Pixar publish any Siggraph papers about the implementation of it, or any other papers its implementation is based upon beside Michael’s chapter in GPU Gem 2?

#5

Thx for the interesting article! I loved Up. :slight_smile:

"Displaced surfaces - no penalty is incurred for rendering displacements, a huge advantage over ray tracing. "

Does that mean that there is no AO from the details of the displacement or is it calculated as a second step, based on the occlusion information of the point/disk? Or is the resolution of this cloud much higher than I imagine now?

#6

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedColorBleeding/

#7

The displaced geometry is used for the baking of point-cloud.

#8

Very good article! Congrats.

#9

Awesome article! Thank you!

#10

Great article. Thanks! :slight_smile:

#11

Nice article

Will this be an option for the up an coming RFM 4.0?

#12

What were they thinking? :surprised

#13

It is already in the current version of RFM and RMS.

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/rps.html

AO and color bleeding can be done in ray-traced and point-based.

#14

Thx, Kelvin. :slight_smile:

#15

really, really helpful. I hate the infinite raytracing renders. Anybody knows other renderes with this implementation?

Thanks.

#16

great article, I love the work of Pixar and their methods to render images.
regards

#17

so now they use for movies point based color bleeeding and brickmaps for soft reflections right?

#18

The internal renderer in recent builds of Blender 2.5 seems to? I don’t know the code’s inner workings, but it does have approximated AO, and the new indirect lighting mode requires that it be switched on. It does seem to work about as fast as what Pixar describes.

#19 
It is implemented in 3delight:
[http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_43.html#SEC178](http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_43.html#SEC178)
#20 
  Yes PBAGI is temporarily implemented in Blender. However it does not calculate shadowing so GI bleeds through surfaces. But it will be replaced with a per tile irradiance cache method as you can see here: 
[http://durian.blender.org/news/render-development-update/#more-2127](http://durian.blender.org/news/render-development-update/#more-2127)
 
 Point Based Occlusion is implemented a while in Blender and very usable and fast but not as high quality as Pixars:
 [http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/approximate-ambient-occlusion/](http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/approximate-ambient-occlusion/)