Hyperion - Disney's new renderer.

[Vizioen]

Interesting article on Disney's new render-engine and how they optimized it. Maybe Vray can make use of this some day? (Or maybe it does that already)

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/disn...on-yes-disney/

[vlado]

Yeah, yeah... "area lights are the hallmark of physically based rendering" and 100 MB of texture cache is "generous"...

That aside though, the idea has been around for a long time, just not implemented in any renderer on a big scale - f.e. if you go to http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/3Dscanrep/ and scroll down the rendering for the Lucy statue - it was done with a very similar approach back when machines didn't have enough RAM to load the whole model.

Like anything, this has pros and cons. Pros is that obviously you can render very very large scenes. Cons are that *simple* scenes that do fit in ram are somewhat slower to render than a regular tightly optimized raytracer because there is some overhead in the whole system. A big con is that the raytracing pipeline becomes extremely fixed and makes some things like the basic dirt texture that requires to trace several rays and do something with the aggregate result afterwards, somewhat more difficult (if not impossible) to implement. And you can forget about experimenting with different algorithms like bidirectional path tracing - it requires a major overhaul. It will be interesting to see how this evolves for sure and I'll be curious to see what issues those guys come against and how they solve them.

In any case, I do want to experiment with a similar idea - we already have the ability to trace bunches of rays, which we use currently for camera rays only (we used this idea extensively for the initial V-Ray RT CPU implementation for all rays, before we abandoned the idea of a separate RT tracing pipeline). I want to do a little bit of research and extend this to as many rays as possible and see if there are any performance gains with dynamic geometry and tiled textures.

Best regards,
Vlado