stochastic pruning

[judderman]

Been reading about Avatar's production techniques and stochastic pruning popped up. I don't know how it compares to LOD rendering, but it seemed like an interesting way to do things nonetheless.

Is this something anyone here has had any experience with? Is it something that could work with vray? At the moment we use proxies to enable use to render huge scenes, but surely it's still loading in the full proxy file regardless of how close it is to the camera - isn't this a bit inefficient?

Regards,

Judderman

[jacksc02]

where were you reading about it?
I would be interested in reading about the production

[instinct]

http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/...her-World.aspx

Here i assume ?

[judderman]

I think it might be the same article. The one I read was:

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_...?story_id=5434

[vlado]

At the moment we use proxies to enable use to render huge scenes, but surely it's still loading in the full proxy file regardless of how close it is to the camera - isn't this a bit inefficient?

It is, and we are working on this, although with a somewhat different approach

Best regards,
Vlado

[jacksc02]

interesting......

[rmejia]

The future is looking better every day

[dlparisi]

I read in the current cinefex that in order to light the jungle scenes efficiently Weta used a "new" technique called spherical harmonics to determine lighting directions, shadows, etc... (pg. 129). It kind of sounded like an elaborate ambient occlusion setup. It also sounded something like a single bounce irradiance map. Anyways, it sounded interesting, just wondring if anyone know more about it or if it's something that could be adapted to vray.

[vlado]

Spherical harmonics are not new; they have been used in games for years. (The irradiance map of V-Ray is also a very basic case of this technique.)

Best regards,
Vlado

[judderman]

Sounds good Vlado, look forward to hearing what that will be exactly!

I thought the forests in avatar were stunning, initially I thought parts of it were real, but read later the forests were entirely 3D. Amazing stuff.