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AFAIK Industrial Light and Magic used Arnold for a lot of movies, Framestore used Arnold for Gravity (I'm not sure what they use now), Double Negative uses a wh

AFAIK Industrial Light and Magic used Arnold for a lot of movies, Framestore used Arnold for Gravity (I'm not sure what they use now), Double Negative uses a whole range of renderers (with layer between their OSL shaders and the renderers) and Weta uses their own in-house renderer Manuka now. Most studios switched away from Renderman as its support for ray tracing was extremely lacking until a year ago. On your list of points: * Bidirectional path tracing and VCM, surely is nice, but you're absolutely fine with just path tracing. Artists have learned how do to avoid SDS paths and how to optimize their scenes for path tracing. It would require a lot of time to train artists to optimize their scenes for VCM and with the amount of diffuse noise (which is unavoidable) I'm not even sure if it's worth it. * I doubt the subsurface scattering in Cycles is slower than Renderman as it only supports bicubic and gaussian profiles which are even easier to evaluate and sample than the approximate BSSRDF ;). Their profiles are extremely lacking (and I doubt it's enough these days), but SPI used bicubics and gaussians a few years ago [1]. * I absolutely can't imagine that Cycles doesn't have Environment Map sampling, which is something pretty basic and explained in PBRT. Sure, Cycles probably doesn't have an implementation of "Portal-Masked Environment Map Sampling" by Bitterli, Novak and Jarosz yet, so I'm sure Renderman is better at it, but Cycles is decent at it. * Same for arbitrary geometry lights, but I'm sure Renderman does a better job at it (although Pixar is probably limited by Solid Angle's patents on importance sampling quads and other stuff, Cycles doesn't have to deal with patents). * AFAIK Cycles has a state of the art hair shader, but it seems to lack the importance sampling scheme by Eugene d'Eon. I absolutely agree with you that Renderman is a more complete and faster renderer, but Cycles is absolutely amazing if you keep in mind that it was completely developed by a small team of hobbyists. Cycles isn't meant for production rendering, but it's amazing for hobbyists. [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2504520 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2504520

ykl 11y ago
All fair points! From your username, would you happen to be Marcos or someone else from Solid Angle? If so, big fan of Arnold. :)
- solidangle 11y ago
  Nope, sadly not. This username was one of the few computer graphics related usernames left on reddit and solid angle sampling is so much cooler than area sampling. You're not only person who thought this, so it's probably about time that I switch to a different username. I'm also a big fan of their work, though, I would love to work for that company once I'm done with university. Btw, I also really enjoy reading your blog, keep up the good work. Looking forward to the day that you release the source of your renderer.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
> * Bidirectional path tracing and VCM, surely is nice, but you're absolutely fine with just path tracing. Artists have learned how do to avoid SDS paths and how to optimize their scenes for path tracing. It would require a lot of time to train artists to optimize their scenes for VCM and with the amount of diffuse noise (which is unavoidable) I'm not even sure if it's worth it. This is %100 not true. Forward path tracing is not adequate for anything except for direct illumination. Any enclosed space that has most of it's illumination from some sort of bounce is not feasible without some sort of illumination caching. Bidirectional path tracing and VCM do not carry any addition complexity from an artist's point of view. Also avoiding SDS paths is not always something that artists can simply avoid, and any illumination that is missing is room for improvement. Do you have links to Solid Angle's patents? Renderman actually samples emissive geometry exceptionally well.
- 332451b 11y ago
  Forward path tracing is what is used to render more than 95% of graphics you see in movies today. It's not great for closed spaces and VCM is better, but it's definitely possible to render everything with forward path tracing. People have been doing it for years, bidirectional methods have only started to get used in production very recently.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    Forward path tracing with direct lighting only has been done for 'years' (about 4-5 years). Pure forward path tracing without caching of secondary illumination is being done now, but at great expense of render time and artist time to deal with the inevitable noise. It is something that people are getting to work in the end but it is a consistently painful disaster. So basically forward path tracing is not adequate. That doesn't mean it can't be forced to work through huge render farms, hacks, compositor painting and who knows what else.
    - 332451b 11y ago
      I agree it's possible to do better than forward path tracing, but a big part of why nearly everyone switched to it was that it significantly reduces artist time, is a lot less painful and requires fewer hacks than the methods used before it. The state of the art keeps improving but I've never heard any call the switch to forward path tracing a painful disaster, quite the opposite.

ykl 11y ago

All fair points! From your username, would you happen to be Marcos or someone else from Solid Angle? If so, big fan of Arnold. :)

solidangle 11y ago
Nope, sadly not. This username was one of the few computer graphics related usernames left on reddit and solid angle sampling is so much cooler than area sampling. You're not only person who thought this, so it's probably about time that I switch to a different username. I'm also a big fan of their work, though, I would love to work for that company once I'm done with university. Btw, I also really enjoy reading your blog, keep up the good work. Looking forward to the day that you release the source of your renderer.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

> * Bidirectional path tracing and VCM, surely is nice, but you're absolutely fine with just path tracing. Artists have learned how do to avoid SDS paths and how to optimize their scenes for path tracing. It would require a lot of time to train artists to optimize their scenes for VCM and with the amount of diffuse noise (which is unavoidable) I'm not even sure if it's worth it. This is %100 not true. Forward path tracing is not adequate for anything except for direct illumination. Any enclosed space that has most of it's illumination from some sort of bounce is not feasible without some sort of illumination caching. Bidirectional path tracing and VCM do not carry any addition complexity from an artist's point of view. Also avoiding SDS paths is not always something that artists can simply avoid, and any illumination that is missing is room for improvement. Do you have links to Solid Angle's patents? Renderman actually samples emissive geometry exceptionally well.

332451b 11y ago
Forward path tracing is what is used to render more than 95% of graphics you see in movies today. It's not great for closed spaces and VCM is better, but it's definitely possible to render everything with forward path tracing. People have been doing it for years, bidirectional methods have only started to get used in production very recently.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  Forward path tracing with direct lighting only has been done for 'years' (about 4-5 years). Pure forward path tracing without caching of secondary illumination is being done now, but at great expense of render time and artist time to deal with the inevitable noise. It is something that people are getting to work in the end but it is a consistently painful disaster. So basically forward path tracing is not adequate. That doesn't mean it can't be forced to work through huge render farms, hacks, compositor painting and who knows what else.
  - 332451b 11y ago
    I agree it's possible to do better than forward path tracing, but a big part of why nearly everyone switched to it was that it significantly reduces artist time, is a lot less painful and requires fewer hacks than the methods used before it. The state of the art keeps improving but I've never heard any call the switch to forward path tracing a painful disaster, quite the opposite.