4 ms·

How long does it take to render a frame from a Disney's newest CGI movie release? 12 hours? So yeah, once the hardware improvements bring down that 12 hours to

How long does it take to render a frame from a Disney's newest CGI movie release? 12 hours? So yeah, once the hardware improvements bring down that 12 hours to 16 milliseconds, then we won't need the hacks...

xiphias2 6y ago
Actually people don’t expect realistic simularion. They expect better. I love the original Lion King, but the movie was just plain boring with its realistic graphics.
- manquer 6y ago
  Making good entertainment has nothing to do with limitations of the medium. It has do with creativity and talent. The original lion King worked because it was hand drawn graphics, the story , the dance and expressions on cat faces worked because graphics was limited. The new one was a dull imitation with no understanding of what made it successful. you should checkout the screen rant video on this https://youtu.be/sbx97kKHUHw https://youtu.be/sbx97kKHUHw Art and games have been successful even if medium is limiting,ppl still read books watch plays and enjoy playing games like FNAF even if far superior tech is available.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Sure, you are right about all of this, I just was explaining that even when we have perfect simulations, people want more. If the limitations of medium wouldn’t matter, people and studios wouldn’t pay billions of dollars for VFX.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    I though Lion King was ok. The new Beauty and Beast movie however was a whole lot worse than the cartoon. Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs Potts, etc all felt a lot more human and emotional in the cartoon than with the “realistic” CGI. They actually looked creepy in the new movie.
  - Andrex 6y ago
    I personally cannot wait; the YouTube channel YMS is doing a 3+ hour review. If it's close in quality to their Kimba video[0] we're in for a treat. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4
asutekku 6y ago
Disney's latest CGI films are rendered on a much higher resolution and with multiple denoising passes and other settings set to max to hide even the smallest instances of grain. One would get a similar result with much less time and the differences would not be noticeable for 99% of the people, if they were to turn down some settings a bit.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > rendered on a much higher resolution and with multiple denoising passes and other settings set to max to hide even the smallest instances of grain Is that to let them create something like a (say) 16K archival master that covers all the formats they might want for the foreseeable future without an expensive re-render?
  - shiburizu 6y ago
    Rendering at a higher resolution than the format target and downsampling to the target provides anti-aliasing. Gives them the "CGI" smoothness.
josefx 6y ago
> 16 milliseconds Way too slow for VR, try 5 ms just to be sure.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Thankfully few [1] care about VR, and the fad cycle is over for now. If they get it better and more relevant in the future we can check again! [1] Few as in "not enough to matter much". There can still be millions of enthusiasts, but the market predictions and "disruption" didn't pan out.
  - q-big 6y ago
    > but the market predictions and "disruption" didn't pan out. "Disruption" means that you create a less qualitative, but cheaper product that would cannibalize the margins of the product of a company whose products are high-margin (think cutting-edge CPUs of Intel). This "cheap" product will for a long time ridiculed as toy (but nevertheless sell in huge amounts because it is cheap) - until it suddenly "lifts off", becomes an inconvenient competitor, and disrupts the market. Does this description of disruption sound like any market prediction from the last 10 years how the market for VR glasses will develop? I don't think so.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >"Disruption" means that you create a less qualitative, but cheaper product that would cannibalize the margins of the product of a company whose products are high-margin Not exclusively. That's disruption in the sense of "undercutting". Disruption in the large also means: "radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation" E.g. "things will change in how we do IT, entertainment, education etc due to VR".
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > Does this description of disruptuon sound like any market prediction from the last 10 years how the market for VR glasses will develop? I don't think so. That's because the limiting factor on VR hardware value to the consumer isn't resolution, or scene complexity as measured in polygons, or FPS, or any of the other metrics by which desktop games and game hardware are evaluated. It is latency. Latency in estimating and rendering the user's pose, movement, and viewport changes. We would have had widespread adoption of immersive content by now if VR experience developers would be willing to sacrifice the 'traditional' metrics in favor of a ruthless focus on latency (and ideally push the hardware vendors in that direction too), but instead everyone keeps chasing "AAA graphics in a headset" , which, given that AAA graphics are (as the OP states) an ever-rising bar, can't ever really work except on whatever the current highest-end hardware is, and any experience that breaks people's willing suspension of disbelief on everything but the highest end hardware can't end up being a commercial success, any more than a multiplayer game with noticeable lag on anything under gigabit FTTH could (and for the same reason, except that the lag for VR starts with the single-player version, and only gets worse from there).
bonzini 6y ago
Backdrops for the Mandalorian are rendered in real time.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  They're backdrops though.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    They have all kind of motion, detail, etc, though, even persons in the distance. They just don't have close ups of humans...
cuban-frisbee 6y ago
If you take The Mandalorian, which is arguably Disney's hottest ongoing project, then it happens almost entirely in realtime inside the Unreal engine by using their led dot dome screen. https://www.starwars.com/news/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-feature https://www.starwars.com/news/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-fea...
- developerdylan 6y ago
  There's no way the final rendering is realtime though, right? Post production work is reduced, but not totally eliminated. But the advancements they made with that dome are amazing
  - cuban-frisbee 6y ago
    From what I understand from the documentary they put out then the the background they render in real time is indeed the final picture.Of course mistakes might still need to be fixed later but the rendering is intended to be final.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > There's no way the final rendering is realtime though, right? No I think they literally do photograph the LED screen on the stage with the actors and that is the final composite. Just like with traditional back- and front-projection. I guess it’s graded etc, but so is a completely natural scene.
- PoignardAzur 6y ago
  The requirements are different from animated movies or games, though. Backgrounds are, by definition, not what the viewer is going to focus on. Oftentimes they'll even be out of focus and therefore slightly blurred. Don't get me wrong, Disney's interactive set technique is revolutionary and shows how far Unreal has come, but I still expect future Pixar movies to take hours of rendering for every single frame (because by now that's basically Pixar's selling point).
kllrnohj 6y ago
16ms is too slow. Gaming has long since moved past 60hz. 120hz to 360hz are the current targets, even the latest generation consoles are pushing 120hz modes.
dahart 6y ago
While that gap between film and games has been large for a long time, it definitely is closing now with the latest generation of film renderers based data on ray tracing hardware, and a large push in the film industry to incorporate real-time pre-vis workflows and reduce iteration times. It’s very common for film CG frames to take a few hours but not usually 12 hours. You need to be able to start rendering jobs at the end of the day and have them ready for dailies on the morning. Jobs that take more than 4 hours risk clogging the queue and taking 2 days per iteration rather than 1, so people are motivated to keep it reasonable. Another important difference between games and film is antialiasing techniques. Much of the difference in render time between them is in using fancier texture sampling and using lots more samples than games are willing to use or even need for decent quality.

xiphias2 6y ago

Actually people don’t expect realistic simularion. They expect better. I love the original Lion King, but the movie was just plain boring with its realistic graphics.

manquer 6y ago
Making good entertainment has nothing to do with limitations of the medium. It has do with creativity and talent. The original lion King worked because it was hand drawn graphics, the story , the dance and expressions on cat faces worked because graphics was limited. The new one was a dull imitation with no understanding of what made it successful. you should checkout the screen rant video on this https://youtu.be/sbx97kKHUHw https://youtu.be/sbx97kKHUHw Art and games have been successful even if medium is limiting,ppl still read books watch plays and enjoy playing games like FNAF even if far superior tech is available.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Sure, you are right about all of this, I just was explaining that even when we have perfect simulations, people want more. If the limitations of medium wouldn’t matter, people and studios wouldn’t pay billions of dollars for VFX.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  I though Lion King was ok. The new Beauty and Beast movie however was a whole lot worse than the cartoon. Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs Potts, etc all felt a lot more human and emotional in the cartoon than with the “realistic” CGI. They actually looked creepy in the new movie.
- Andrex 6y ago
  I personally cannot wait; the YouTube channel YMS is doing a 3+ hour review. If it's close in quality to their Kimba video[0] we're in for a treat. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4

asutekku 6y ago

Disney's latest CGI films are rendered on a much higher resolution and with multiple denoising passes and other settings set to max to hide even the smallest instances of grain. One would get a similar result with much less time and the differences would not be noticeable for 99% of the people, if they were to turn down some settings a bit.

zimpenfish 6y ago
> rendered on a much higher resolution and with multiple denoising passes and other settings set to max to hide even the smallest instances of grain Is that to let them create something like a (say) 16K archival master that covers all the formats they might want for the foreseeable future without an expensive re-render?
- shiburizu 6y ago
  Rendering at a higher resolution than the format target and downsampling to the target provides anti-aliasing. Gives them the "CGI" smoothness.

josefx 6y ago

> 16 milliseconds Way too slow for VR, try 5 ms just to be sure.

coldtea 6y ago
Thankfully few [1] care about VR, and the fad cycle is over for now. If they get it better and more relevant in the future we can check again! [1] Few as in "not enough to matter much". There can still be millions of enthusiasts, but the market predictions and "disruption" didn't pan out.
- q-big 6y ago
  > but the market predictions and "disruption" didn't pan out. "Disruption" means that you create a less qualitative, but cheaper product that would cannibalize the margins of the product of a company whose products are high-margin (think cutting-edge CPUs of Intel). This "cheap" product will for a long time ridiculed as toy (but nevertheless sell in huge amounts because it is cheap) - until it suddenly "lifts off", becomes an inconvenient competitor, and disrupts the market. Does this description of disruption sound like any market prediction from the last 10 years how the market for VR glasses will develop? I don't think so.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >"Disruption" means that you create a less qualitative, but cheaper product that would cannibalize the margins of the product of a company whose products are high-margin Not exclusively. That's disruption in the sense of "undercutting". Disruption in the large also means: "radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation" E.g. "things will change in how we do IT, entertainment, education etc due to VR".
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Does this description of disruptuon sound like any market prediction from the last 10 years how the market for VR glasses will develop? I don't think so. That's because the limiting factor on VR hardware value to the consumer isn't resolution, or scene complexity as measured in polygons, or FPS, or any of the other metrics by which desktop games and game hardware are evaluated. It is latency. Latency in estimating and rendering the user's pose, movement, and viewport changes. We would have had widespread adoption of immersive content by now if VR experience developers would be willing to sacrifice the 'traditional' metrics in favor of a ruthless focus on latency (and ideally push the hardware vendors in that direction too), but instead everyone keeps chasing "AAA graphics in a headset" , which, given that AAA graphics are (as the OP states) an ever-rising bar, can't ever really work except on whatever the current highest-end hardware is, and any experience that breaks people's willing suspension of disbelief on everything but the highest end hardware can't end up being a commercial success, any more than a multiplayer game with noticeable lag on anything under gigabit FTTH could (and for the same reason, except that the lag for VR starts with the single-player version, and only gets worse from there).

bonzini 6y ago

Backdrops for the Mandalorian are rendered in real time.

skrebbel 6y ago
They're backdrops though.
- coldtea 6y ago
  They have all kind of motion, detail, etc, though, even persons in the distance. They just don't have close ups of humans...

cuban-frisbee 6y ago

If you take The Mandalorian, which is arguably Disney's hottest ongoing project, then it happens almost entirely in realtime inside the Unreal engine by using their led dot dome screen. https://www.starwars.com/news/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-feature https://www.starwars.com/news/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-fea...

developerdylan 6y ago
There's no way the final rendering is realtime though, right? Post production work is reduced, but not totally eliminated. But the advancements they made with that dome are amazing
- cuban-frisbee 6y ago
  From what I understand from the documentary they put out then the the background they render in real time is indeed the final picture.Of course mistakes might still need to be fixed later but the rendering is intended to be final.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > There's no way the final rendering is realtime though, right? No I think they literally do photograph the LED screen on the stage with the actors and that is the final composite. Just like with traditional back- and front-projection. I guess it’s graded etc, but so is a completely natural scene.
PoignardAzur 6y ago
The requirements are different from animated movies or games, though. Backgrounds are, by definition, not what the viewer is going to focus on. Oftentimes they'll even be out of focus and therefore slightly blurred. Don't get me wrong, Disney's interactive set technique is revolutionary and shows how far Unreal has come, but I still expect future Pixar movies to take hours of rendering for every single frame (because by now that's basically Pixar's selling point).

kllrnohj 6y ago

16ms is too slow. Gaming has long since moved past 60hz. 120hz to 360hz are the current targets, even the latest generation consoles are pushing 120hz modes.

dahart 6y ago

While that gap between film and games has been large for a long time, it definitely is closing now with the latest generation of film renderers based data on ray tracing hardware, and a large push in the film industry to incorporate real-time pre-vis workflows and reduce iteration times. It’s very common for film CG frames to take a few hours but not usually 12 hours. You need to be able to start rendering jobs at the end of the day and have them ready for dailies on the morning. Jobs that take more than 4 hours risk clogging the queue and taking 2 days per iteration rather than 1, so people are motivated to keep it reasonable. Another important difference between games and film is antialiasing techniques. Much of the difference in render time between them is in using fancier texture sampling and using lots more samples than games are willing to use or even need for decent quality.