Maxon Acquires Redshift Rendering Technologies
www.awn.com/news/maxon-acquires-redshift-rendering-technologies
Developers of Cinema 4D acquire a powerful and flexible GPU-accelerated renderer.
Introducing Arnold 5.3 with Arnold GPU in public beta
www.arnoldrenderer.com/news/press-release-arnold-5-3-gpu/
Autodesk unveiled Arnold 5.3 with Arnold GPU in public beta today. The highly-anticipated release provides artists with a first taste of GPU rendering for a set number of features, and the flexibility to choose between rendering on the CPU or GPU without changing renderers.
Arnold 5.3 with Arnold GPU in public beta will be available for download on March 20, 2019 as of 12 noon PT / 3pm ET.
Vancouver Animators Win Overtime Pay
drive.google.com/file/d/1adi2nB7oMhpxAF1nh74lcT2VrfrVY3qu/view
In response to the complaint, Cinesite had originally claimed that employees were not entitled to the overtime pay specified in the province’s Employment Standards Act, because animation artists were high-technology professionals developing information systems.
The Employment Standard Branch’s investigating officer, however, ruled that the exclusion did not apply to studio workers whose primary job was using commercially available software to create visual effects.
Weta Digital – Manuka Raytracer and Gazebo GPU renderers – pipeline
https://jo.dreggn.org/home/2018_manuka.pdf
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/manuka-weta-digitals-new-renderer/
The Manuka rendering architecture has been designed in the spirit of the classic reyes rendering architecture. In its core, reyes is based on stochastic rasterisation of micropolygons, facilitating depth of field, motion blur, high geometric complexity,and programmable shading.
This is commonly achieved with Monte Carlo path tracing, using a paradigm often called shade-on-hit, in which the renderer alternates tracing rays with running shaders on the various ray hits. The shaders take the role of generating the inputs of the local material structure which is then used bypath sampling logic to evaluate contributions and to inform what further rays to cast through the scene.
Over the years, however, the expectations have risen substantially when it comes to image quality. Computing pictures which are indistinguishable from real footage requires accurate simulation of light transport, which is most often performed using some variant of Monte Carlo path tracing. Unfortunately this paradigm requires random memory accesses to the whole scene and does not lend itself well to a rasterisation approach at all.
Manuka is both a uni-directional and bidirectional path tracer and encompasses multiple importance sampling (MIS). Interestingly, and importantly for production character skin work, it is the first major production renderer to incorporate spectral MIS in the form of a new ‘Hero Spectral Sampling’ technique, which was recently published at Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2014.
Manuka propose a shade-before-hit paradigm in-stead and minimise I/O strain (and some memory costs) on the system, leveraging locality of reference by running pattern generation shaders before we execute light transport simulation by path sampling, “compressing” any bvh structure as needed, and as such also limiting duplication of source data.
The difference with reyes is that instead of baking colors into the geometry like in Reyes, manuka bakes surface closures. This means that light transport is still calculated with path tracing, but all texture lookups etc. are done up-front and baked into the geometry.
The main drawback with this method is that geometry has to be tessellated to its highest, stable topology before shading can be evaluated properly. As such, the high cost to first pixel. Even a basic 4 vertices square becomes a much more complex model with this approach.
Manuka use the RenderMan Shading Language (rsl) for programmable shading [Pixar Animation Studios 2015], but we do not invoke rsl shaders when intersecting a ray with a surface (often called shade-on-hit). Instead, we pre-tessellate and pre-shade all the input geometry in the front end of the renderer.
This way, we can efficiently order shading computations to sup-port near-optimal texture locality, vectorisation, and parallelism. This system avoids repeated evaluation of shaders at the same surface point, and presents a minimal amount of memory to be accessed during light transport time. An added benefit is that the acceleration structure for ray tracing (abounding volume hierarchy, bvh) is built once on the final tessellated geometry, which allows us to ray trace more efficiently than multi-level bvhs and avoids costly caching of on-demand tessellated micropolygons and the associated scheduling issues.
For the shading reasons above, in terms of AOVs, the studio approach is to succeed at combining complex shading with ray paths in the render rather than pass a multi-pass render to compositing.
For the Spectral Rendering component. The light transport stage is fully spectral, using a continuously sampled wavelength which is traced with each path and used to apply the spectral camera sensitivity of the sensor. This allows for faithfully support any degree of observer metamerism as the camera footage they are intended to match as well as complex materials which require wavelength dependent phenomena such as diffraction, dispersion, interference, iridescence, or chromatic extinction and Rayleigh scattering in participating media.
As opposed to the original reyes paper, we use bilinear interpolation of these bsdf inputs later when evaluating bsdfs per pathv ertex during light transport4. This improves temporal stability of geometry which moves very slowly with respect to the pixel raster
In terms of the pipeline, everything rendered at Weta was already completely interwoven with their deep data pipeline. Manuka very much was written with deep data in mind. Here, Manuka not so much extends the deep capabilities, rather it fully matches the already extremely complex and powerful setup Weta Digital already enjoy with RenderMan. For example, an ape in a scene can be selected, its ID is available and a NUKE artist can then paint in 3D say a hand and part of the way up the neutral posed ape.
We called our system Manuka, as a respectful nod to reyes: we had heard a story froma former ILM employee about how reyes got its name from how fond the early Pixar people were of their lunches at Point Reyes, and decided to name our system after our surrounding natural environment, too. Manuka is a kind of tea tree very common in New Zealand which has very many very small leaves, in analogy to micropolygons ina tree structure for ray tracing. It also happens to be the case that Weta Digital’s main site is on Manuka Street.
What is consciousness
A way for the brain to abstract basic sense and analysis cycles.
Roper Technologies to Acquire Foundry in $544M Deal
www.awn.com/news/roper-technologies-acquire-foundry-544m-deal
The management team, led by CEO Craig Rodgerson, will continue to lead the business from its London headquarters. Foundry’s name and brands are not expected to change as a result of the transaction.
Roper anticipates funding the transaction using its revolving credit facility and cash on hand. During the first 12 months of ownership, Roper expects Foundry to deliver approximately US$75 million of revenue. Roper expects the acquisition to be immediately cash accretive. Foundry has a strong history of growth in revenue, EBITDA, and cash flow, which Roper expects to continue.
The transaction is expected to close in April 2019, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.
