True 3D rendering

[cpnichols]

what i ment by not comparing is how the scene renders on the fly on 140 cpus....so really vray dr system is by far not that...because to send one scene open it in vraydummy and etc takes several seconds etc etc..

Yeah I agree... what RAT has is something called Irma which does the interactive stuff, just keep a bunch of data floating around in g-buffer. It looks to me like this is simply irma on steroids.

RAT also has the ability to do netrender which is similar to DR and mental rays thingy.

[Morbid Angel]

the thing is tho I dont doubdt that render man can do the job well... but how many people and resorces you need to do it. Vray on the other hand can do the job well and have much fewer people involved. I guess everything has its balance.

[cpnichols]

Totally agree with you on that one. Renderman has some VERY smart people working there. Catmull is president of Pixar after all. But renderman is early 80's technology that was designed to run on a vax. It has so much legacy to it is like a supertanker trying to make a left turn. They do very smart things in renderman, but it is still a scanline system at heart, and it can't do GI and reaytracing the way others can. But lets see what happens after "Cars." I think that was the big push to get renderman's raytracer up to snuff.

The other problem is re-educating old fuddy duddy renderman artists and shader writers that have been doing it for 12 years to think raytracing rather than fake everything.

[GeneCrucean]

I still would love that kind of interaction inside my viewports though

In all honesty though, it's not to far from what we have with XSI. All I have to do is drag a render region inside of a viewport and it's basically the same... minus the massive cpu power they obviously have. If I had that kind of power and if MR supported unlimited satellite nodes, we would be sitting pretty.

[Morbid Angel]

cpnichols...this all will become absolete. When realtime kicks in and video cards render gi/sss/displacement in realtime you need not any of that.

[momentum]

Real time rendering is a dream we may never achieve. Anyone here old enough to have worked on a pentium 166 computer. kynetix 3dmax release 2. I remember dreaming of the day we would have 1 to 3 Ghz machines with 2 to 4 Gig ram. And how my scenes would fly and render at real time. And now here we are. The diference is that our computer got better but then we made them do more. I think we will always push our scenes that much more that we never truly achieve real time animatd renders of good quality.

But a still scene rendered that we could rotate at will. That is a gaming engine. And the newer games are looking real good. So maybe it will happen. Or maybe we will keep on pushing our scenes beyond it.

[percydaman]

in a way your dream came true. Im betting realtime stuff today looks better then the stuff prerendered on the P 166 using the Max 2.

[Da_elf]

I remember this article on render power. What i would give to do arch viz on this lol
http://www.digitmag.co.uk/features/i...FeatureID=1162

By the end of the three-part project, the New Zealand-based company had built a massive, 3,200-processor 3D rendering server farm to cope with the load. The installation is ranked on the top 500 supercomputer list as one of the world's largest supercomputer sites. With some 2,400 of those processors residing on blade servers (small rack-mounted servers), and the remainder on traditional servers, it's also one of the most compact.