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Subdivision surfaces as implemented in RenderMan have been a thorny issue in VFX for many years. Most production facilities wind up implementing their own versi

by nezumi 14y ago

Subdivision surfaces as implemented in RenderMan have been a thorny issue in VFX for many years. Most production facilities wind up implementing their own version of subdivision surfaces for other production tools, but still rely on Pixar's implementation for rendering. The nature of the patents in Pixar's implementation make it hard for individual facilities to match the final subdiv output, and risky to release their own open-source implementation for fear of revealing a patent dependency. So this has been a long-time coming, and while the quality of Pixar's implementation is undoubtedly welcome, the main advantage to studios is relaxation of the patent requirement - something Pixar should have done years ago, since all anybody wanted to do with those patents was better utilize the tools they had licensed from Pixar in the first place.

berkut 14y ago
The main reason for this is probably due to the fact that within the last three years, the artists at Pixar have wanted to start using off-the-shelf software for modelling, texturing, animating and compositing, instead of in-house tools as previously. So now they're using Maya, Modo, Mari and Nuke internally, and these apps need to have support for subd to match what PRMan will output.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Is the Disney division using significantly different tools from Pixar? The two were entirely separate companies until the merger and an upheaval in the workflow that significant is not usually so easy to manage.
berkut 14y ago
Thinking about it, Pixar still have several other important patents that are important to the VFX industry - the main one being stochastic sampling for motion blur. Arnold and VRay use this and Shake (compositor) had it as well. Interestingly, I heard a story from an ex-Nothing Real employee where Pixar were going to sue Nothing Real over it, but then Apple bought Shake and the issue went away :)

by nezumi 14y ago

berkut 14y ago

The main reason for this is probably due to the fact that within the last three years, the artists at Pixar have wanted to start using off-the-shelf software for modelling, texturing, animating and compositing, instead of in-house tools as previously. So now they're using Maya, Modo, Mari and Nuke internally, and these apps need to have support for subd to match what PRMan will output.

astrodust 14y ago
Is the Disney division using significantly different tools from Pixar? The two were entirely separate companies until the merger and an upheaval in the workflow that significant is not usually so easy to manage.

berkut 14y ago

Thinking about it, Pixar still have several other important patents that are important to the VFX industry - the main one being stochastic sampling for motion blur. Arnold and VRay use this and Shake (compositor) had it as well. Interestingly, I heard a story from an ex-Nothing Real employee where Pixar were going to sue Nothing Real over it, but then Apple bought Shake and the issue went away :)