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LATEST POSTS
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VFX Pros Expose The Hidden Costs of Marketing Selling a Movie as “Real” and Underselling Digital Work
Visual effects make the impossible possible and thrill audiences, but the artists who toil over delicate and groundbreaking work don’t always get to take a bow—or in some cases, even acknowledge the existence of their work.
The source adds that sometimes there’s a blatant directive that “there will be no discussion of VFX. … We don’t want to overshadow the actors [or] we don’t want to break the mythology that somebody did all of these stunts.”
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BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) in Ray Tracing
Bounding volume hierarchies are used to support several operations on sets of geometric objects efficiently, such as in collision detection and ray tracing. A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects, which form the leaf nodes of the tree, are wrapped in bounding volumes.
BVHs are often used in ray tracing to eliminate potential intersection candidates within a scene by omitting geometric objects located in bounding volumes which are not intersected by the current ray. BVH is a crucial component in ray tracing rendering engines like Arnold, as it helps accelerate ray intersection tests and reduce resource costs.
Users do not have control over RAM consumption of the BVH. Here are some tips to optimize Arnold renders when BVH is the bottleneck:
Optimize Your Scene Geometry. Simplify or optimize your 3D models and scene geometry. Complex geometry can lead to larger BVH structures and longer BVH build times. Consider using LODs (Level of Detail) or proxy objects for distant geometry to reduce the BVH complexity.
Use Arnold Stand-ins and Proxies. Arnold Stand-ins and proxies allow you to load complex geometry only when needed, reducing the BVH complexity during the initial BVH build. This can be particularly useful for scenes with a lot of high-poly assets.
Denoising. Applying denoising to your final render can help reduce the number of rays required and consequently, the BVH intersection tests.
Render in Layers. If your scene has many elements, consider rendering it in layers. This allows you to optimize each layer individually, potentially reducing BVH build times.
Distribute Rendering. If you have access to a render farm or multiple machines, distribute the rendering workload. This can significantly reduce rendering time as each machine can handle a portion of the BVH calculations.
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Why VFX workers are unionising in Hollywood — and why it’s important
https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a44936059/vfx-workers-unionising-hollywood/
Last March, IATSE released a damning survey that showed how visual effects workers lack access to essential benefits, such as health insurance and retirement plans.
It also found VFX crews are lacking breaks and rest periods, and they’re not getting paid for working overtime, resulting in some workers failing to even make minimum wage.
This survey was aimed to organise VFX workers, one of the last areas of the production community that are still not unionised. Given the worsening of their working conditions while their craft is increasingly in demand within the industry, seeking protection has become a necessity.
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Antonio de Curtis, Totò On life as an Artist
I’m very lonely: not terribly lonely. Because I love being alone. I need to be alone: to contemplate, to think. Sometimes even the people I love bother me: my daughter, my wife. And when it happens, quietly, I get up and go to my room. Yes, it’s difficult to live with me: this is a reproach that my mates have always addressed to me, and that Franca also addressed to me at the beginning. Now Franca has become accustomed to it, she finds this life normal even though she is very young.
I understood it, you know? I understood that she would like to go to places, to nightclubs. But I don’t like it, I never have. When I see that false amusement, I can’t help but think that behind each of those people there is a drama: the pianist perhaps has broken shoes, the industrialist has bills that are due, the hostess has her son. sick… I told them: I am a misanthrope, the basis of my life is the house.
The house, for me, is a fortress, almost a person. When I enter I always greet you like a person: “Good evening, home.” Today, for example, Franca is in Lugano and I am alone at home. Well: I’m fine with it.
Antonio de Curtis, Totò
Original version
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CamP: Camera Preconditioning for NERF (Neural Radiance Fields)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.10902.pdf
“…any errors in the camera position solve can dramatically reduce the quality of a reconstruction. “
“Introducing CamP — a method to precondition camera optimization for NeRFs to significantly improve quality. With CamP we’re able to create high quality reconstructions even when input poses are bad.
CamP is a general purpose trick that you can apply in many places. Apply CamP to prior SOTA NeRF models like Zip-NeRF, and you improve quality and establish a new SOTA. Applying CamP to existing camera optimization models, like SCNeRF, to improve their performance.” – Keunhong Park(a) ARKit Poses (w/o COLMAP) (b) ARKit Poses + CamP (Ours) -
Workers at Vancouver’s WildBrain animation studio look to unionize
“…workers are concerned about issues such as scheduling, base pay, and the rising cost of living in Vancouver.
They are also seeking ways to address “the precarity (insecurity) that’s really baked into the industry,” Gladman told CBC’s The Early Edition on Wednesday.
“People are working really short-term contracts, sometimes weeks at a time,” he said. “You go to work on Friday. You’re not sure if you’ll have a job on Monday. I think workers are just tired of holding the bag when things slow down every time.”
FEATURED POSTS
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Lighting Every Darkness with 3DGS: Fast Training and Real-Time Rendering and Denoising for HDR View Synthesis
https://srameo.github.io/projects/le3d/
LE3D is a method for real-time HDR view synthesis from RAW images. It is particularly effective for nighttime scenes.
https://github.com/Srameo/LE3D
Sono molto solo: non terribilmente solo. Perché io amo esser solo. Ho bisogno di essere solo: per contemplare, per pensare. A volte mi danno noia perfino le persone che amo: mia figlia, mia moglie. E, quando accade, zitto zitto, mi alzo e vado in camera mia. Sì, è difficile viver con me: questo è un rimprovero che le mie compagne mi hanno sempre rivolto, che all’ inizio mi rivolgeva anche Franca. Ora Franca vi si è assuefatta, trova questa vita normale sebbene sia giovanissima.
La capivo, sa? Capivo che le sarebbe piaciuto andare nei posti, nei night. Ma a me non piace, non è mai piaciuto. Io, quando vedo quel divertimento falso non posso fare a meno di pensare che dietro a ciascuna di quelle persone v’è un dramma: il pianista magari ha le scarpe rotte, l’industriale ha le cambiali che scadono, l’entraineuse ha il figlio ammalato… Gliel’ho detto: sono un misantropo, la base della mia vita è la casa.
La casa, per me, è una fortezza, quasi una persona. Quando vi entro la saluto sempre come una persona: «Buonasera, casa». Oggi, per esempio, Franca è a Lugano e in casa son solo. Be’: ci sto benissimo.
Antonio de Curtis, Totò