4 ms·

Pixar RenderMan 24 with XPU Hybrid Rendering

59 points by dagmx 5y ago

trinovantes 5y ago
I think the underrated feature with this release is official Blender support. I'm excited to test the differences in RenderMan and Cycles.
- Wistar 5y ago
  That is not only underrated but huge.
  - dagw 5y ago
    And at only $600 (+ $250 a year) RenderMan is comfortably within the budget of serious hobbyists and budding freelancers.
    - Wistar 5y ago
      Or free for non-commercial.
- spupy 5y ago
  Do you know what advantages does Renderman bring in comparison to Cycles or eeven Eevee, for hobbyists mainly?
  - Joeboy 5y ago
    I'm not in a position to make a comparison, but I think a big drawback of cycles is it's very noisy. It's one of those things where you maybe get an OK looking render in 30s, but it takes >5m to get a render that's actually noise free. Which is workable for still frames, but painful for animation.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    For hobbysists? Likely not much, other than familiarity with an industry standard renderer (though not as popular as it once was). For professionals, you get quite a few things but speed optimizations (resolves faster in my experience), render quality (usually fewer fireflies in my experience) and some more advanced transmission models to name just a few.
pjmlp 5y ago
The only time I had access to Renderman documentation was during my thesis, porting a particle based visualization engine from Objective-C/NeXT Cube into a plain Windows/OpenGL 1.1/MFC. Reading that, alongside "The Renderman Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics" was eye opening how far behind regular PCs were from such graphical workstations. Naturally that was about 20 something years ago, very interessing to see how much Renderman has moved beyond that, and the evolution of programmable GPGPU as well. https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Steve-Upstill/dp/0201508680 https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Steve-Upstill/dp/0201508680
flakiness 5y ago
There is a slightly dated (2018) paper [1] on their (offline) renderer. Although many details are far beyond my comprehension, it's still fascinating to see how artistic demands lead the technical development pushing the limit. You'll see why some people are so passionate about computer graphics. Looking forward to the paper on this XPU thing. [1] https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RendermanTog2018/paper.pdf https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RendermanTog2018/paper.pd...
jarrell_mark 5y ago
"Researchers, individual artists, and students creating non-commercial projects will have access to Free Non-Commercial RenderMan the same day as the commercial release."
- Pirgo 5y ago
  Unfortunately XPU will not be available in non-commercial version.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  do individual artists not want to sell their work? It's more like hobbyists with no intention of making money.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    This is primarily so people can learn the renderer in their free time and for educational use. It's akin to what used to be called the Personal Learning Editions in the industry.
makepanic 5y ago
They have a separate release page with visual changes between the versions: https://renderman.pixar.com/whats-new https://renderman.pixar.com/whats-new
- ksec 5y ago
  @dang I think the link should change to this one which better reflect on the new release.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    I too would like it to be changed to the fetaure link. AFAIK this page was not available when I posted the release PR statement. Also several of my partners shots are in their product announcement page, which is nice to see. (To be clear I don't work for Pixar and they aren't in the rendering team so this post wasn't a plug)
dagw 5y ago
As someone who worked with RenderMan at an animation studio 20 years ago and hasn't really looked at it since, the first thing that struck me was how much the price has come down.
- Narann 5y ago
  Renderman was alone in its category. REYES approach brings things other renderers couldn't render; fast motion blur, per pixel displacement, aka microsurface, etc. No other renderer provide such fast implementation of this. Renderman was hard to learn but the promise was here: It was fast. With time the REYES approach starts to show its age (need a lot of preparation work) bad raytrace performances due to “combining” REYES and ray tracing in the same engine, etc. forcing it to fall back in the same competition line (and price) than it's competitors. Full feature animation movie is not the only market. For example Vray for Maya (used on Tron Legacy) was a good combination between ease of use inside Maya and the technical director features (features that need some dedication and knowledge, like python pre execution directly on render scene) make it a joy to use.
- lvncelot 5y ago
  It's also free for non-commercial purposes since 2015 I think.
ksec 5y ago
>RenderMan XPU™ Pixar’s solution for CPU + GPU rendering uses heterogeneous computing resources to accelerate production path-tracing. Starting from a system architecture that can leverage the latest developments in many-core CPU and GPU hardware, separately or in combination, RenderMan XPU™ is being built to handle the scale and complexity of Pixar’s feature animation projects. Its first use in the studio has been focused on detailed look-development tasks, with more roles and capabilities to come. >RenderMan XPU is only available to commercial customers of RenderMan. >For GPU acceleration, RenderMan XPU™ supports NVIDIA graphics cards from the Quadro, Tesla or Data Center GPU ranges, with the Maxwell architecture or later. Go XPU is Nvidia only. Not really surprised as I assume no one uses AMD in those production environment. But I wonder how hard would it be to port to something like Metal or Apple Silicon.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Octane supports Metal alongside Optix 7, so I guess a similar effort would be needed. https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/ https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/
  - Pulcinella 5y ago
    I can’t seem to find it but I believe there was a Otoy forums post explaining how Octane supports AMD (and Apple GPUs) via Metal. So Octane runs under MacOS with an AMD GPU but not Windows on that same Mac. They said that they are waiting for AMD’s Vulkan support to improve. Edit: post is here: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411 https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411 Edit 2: Also interesting is this part: “I must thank the great folks at Apple who helped us with the hardest parts, some of whom we have been working with for the better part of a decade on this. There is basically no way Octane has any future on Apple's hardware going forward without us doing this work, and we needed their help to make it happen this year.” So it sounds like if Apple really wants you on their platform, they will provide significant help. Given the close relationship between Pixar and Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Pixar support Metal in some capacity.
- p_l 5y ago
  Being nVidia specific suggests the use of CUDA and possibly direct PTX code generation, which pretty much means a total rewrite if you want to make it run on underpowered mobile gpu or one that doesn't support CUDA.

59 points by dagmx 5y ago

I think the underrated feature with this release is official Blender support. I'm excited to test the differences in RenderMan and Cycles.

Wistar 5y ago
That is not only underrated but huge.
- dagw 5y ago
  And at only $600 (+ $250 a year) RenderMan is comfortably within the budget of serious hobbyists and budding freelancers.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Or free for non-commercial.
spupy 5y ago
Do you know what advantages does Renderman bring in comparison to Cycles or eeven Eevee, for hobbyists mainly?
- Joeboy 5y ago
  I'm not in a position to make a comparison, but I think a big drawback of cycles is it's very noisy. It's one of those things where you maybe get an OK looking render in 30s, but it takes >5m to get a render that's actually noise free. Which is workable for still frames, but painful for animation.
- dagmx 5y ago
  For hobbysists? Likely not much, other than familiarity with an industry standard renderer (though not as popular as it once was). For professionals, you get quite a few things but speed optimizations (resolves faster in my experience), render quality (usually fewer fireflies in my experience) and some more advanced transmission models to name just a few.

pjmlp 5y ago

The only time I had access to Renderman documentation was during my thesis, porting a particle based visualization engine from Objective-C/NeXT Cube into a plain Windows/OpenGL 1.1/MFC. Reading that, alongside "The Renderman Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics" was eye opening how far behind regular PCs were from such graphical workstations. Naturally that was about 20 something years ago, very interessing to see how much Renderman has moved beyond that, and the evolution of programmable GPGPU as well. https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Steve-Upstill/dp/0201508680 https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Steve-Upstill/dp/0201508680

flakiness 5y ago

There is a slightly dated (2018) paper [1] on their (offline) renderer. Although many details are far beyond my comprehension, it's still fascinating to see how artistic demands lead the technical development pushing the limit. You'll see why some people are so passionate about computer graphics. Looking forward to the paper on this XPU thing. [1] https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RendermanTog2018/paper.pdf https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RendermanTog2018/paper.pd...

jarrell_mark 5y ago

"Researchers, individual artists, and students creating non-commercial projects will have access to Free Non-Commercial RenderMan the same day as the commercial release."

Pirgo 5y ago
Unfortunately XPU will not be available in non-commercial version.
LegitShady 5y ago
do individual artists not want to sell their work? It's more like hobbyists with no intention of making money.
- dagmx 5y ago
  This is primarily so people can learn the renderer in their free time and for educational use. It's akin to what used to be called the Personal Learning Editions in the industry.

makepanic 5y ago

They have a separate release page with visual changes between the versions: https://renderman.pixar.com/whats-new https://renderman.pixar.com/whats-new

ksec 5y ago
@dang I think the link should change to this one which better reflect on the new release.
- dagmx 5y ago
  I too would like it to be changed to the fetaure link. AFAIK this page was not available when I posted the release PR statement. Also several of my partners shots are in their product announcement page, which is nice to see. (To be clear I don't work for Pixar and they aren't in the rendering team so this post wasn't a plug)

dagw 5y ago

As someone who worked with RenderMan at an animation studio 20 years ago and hasn't really looked at it since, the first thing that struck me was how much the price has come down.

Narann 5y ago
Renderman was alone in its category. REYES approach brings things other renderers couldn't render; fast motion blur, per pixel displacement, aka microsurface, etc. No other renderer provide such fast implementation of this. Renderman was hard to learn but the promise was here: It was fast. With time the REYES approach starts to show its age (need a lot of preparation work) bad raytrace performances due to “combining” REYES and ray tracing in the same engine, etc. forcing it to fall back in the same competition line (and price) than it's competitors. Full feature animation movie is not the only market. For example Vray for Maya (used on Tron Legacy) was a good combination between ease of use inside Maya and the technical director features (features that need some dedication and knowledge, like python pre execution directly on render scene) make it a joy to use.
lvncelot 5y ago
It's also free for non-commercial purposes since 2015 I think.

ksec 5y ago

>RenderMan XPU™ Pixar’s solution for CPU + GPU rendering uses heterogeneous computing resources to accelerate production path-tracing. Starting from a system architecture that can leverage the latest developments in many-core CPU and GPU hardware, separately or in combination, RenderMan XPU™ is being built to handle the scale and complexity of Pixar’s feature animation projects. Its first use in the studio has been focused on detailed look-development tasks, with more roles and capabilities to come. >RenderMan XPU is only available to commercial customers of RenderMan. >For GPU acceleration, RenderMan XPU™ supports NVIDIA graphics cards from the Quadro, Tesla or Data Center GPU ranges, with the Maxwell architecture or later. Go XPU is Nvidia only. Not really surprised as I assume no one uses AMD in those production environment. But I wonder how hard would it be to port to something like Metal or Apple Silicon.

pjmlp 5y ago
Octane supports Metal alongside Optix 7, so I guess a similar effort would be needed. https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/ https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/
- Pulcinella 5y ago
  I can’t seem to find it but I believe there was a Otoy forums post explaining how Octane supports AMD (and Apple GPUs) via Metal. So Octane runs under MacOS with an AMD GPU but not Windows on that same Mac. They said that they are waiting for AMD’s Vulkan support to improve. Edit: post is here: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411 https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411 Edit 2: Also interesting is this part: “I must thank the great folks at Apple who helped us with the hardest parts, some of whom we have been working with for the better part of a decade on this. There is basically no way Octane has any future on Apple's hardware going forward without us doing this work, and we needed their help to make it happen this year.” So it sounds like if Apple really wants you on their platform, they will provide significant help. Given the close relationship between Pixar and Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Pixar support Metal in some capacity.
p_l 5y ago
Being nVidia specific suggests the use of CUDA and possibly direct PTX code generation, which pretty much means a total rewrite if you want to make it run on underpowered mobile gpu or one that doesn't support CUDA.