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The animation studio I worked for in the mid-late 90s was a Softimage shop using SGI Indigo and Intel pentium workstations with a 20-30 machine Alpha (NT) rende
by Wistar 7y ago
The animation studio I worked for in the mid-late 90s was a Softimage shop using SGI Indigo and Intel pentium workstations with a 20-30 machine Alpha (NT) render farm. It was a very good setup with one weird issue: depending on the type of render being done, especially anything with ray marching, the SGI or Intel workstations couldn't participate in the render because the results looked subtly different.
- rowanG077 7y agoProbably a bug in the render code that made it look different.
- Wistar 7y agoIt was explained to me as a difference in the way certain arithmetic calculation were made in the actual hardware. The render engine was mental ray. It was really only apparent if there were atmospherics, such as volumetric lighting, in the scene. Net renders with the workstations participating would come back with some of the resulting tiles looking noticeably different—the density of the atmospheric effects (ray marching) would appear to have differing densities between the alpha-rendered tiles and the SGI or Intel-rendered tiles.