MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, as well as future titles. MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework.
Note: it does not support osl and usd handling is limited. Cycles may still be a fair alternative.
A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer that’s capable of both DreamWorks’ trademark stylised look and photorealism.
It has all the required features for that setup, including Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs), which allow data from a shader or renderer to be output during rendering to aid compositing. Additionally, Deep Output and Cryptomatte are supported.
With support for OptiX 7.6 and GPU render denoising with Open Image Denoise 2, MoonRay is able to deliver particularly impressive results, especially when working interactively.
MoonRay has moved to a hybrid CPU and GPU rendering mode for its default state. It’s called XPU, and in many ways combines the best of both types of rendering workflow.
VFX Reference Platform 2023 is probably the biggest addition because it enables the use of MoonRay directly in Nuke 15.
MoonRay has already achieved great success with an array of feature films. Now the renderer is open source, the CG world can expect to see a whole new swathe of MoonRay-powered animations.
EasyFrontend offers a collection of UI Components, Blocks, and Sections built with HTML, React, Bootstrap, and Tailwind CSS to enable you to make a site in minutes.
DocRes is a new model that simplifies document image restoration by handling five tasks: dewarping, deshadowing, appearance enhancement, deblurring, and binarization within a single system.
The new model, MAI-1, is expected to have about 500 billion parameters, Seeking Alpha reported Monday (May 6), citing a paywalled article by The Information.
Apple has released Final Cut Camera for iPhone and iPad, allowing filmmakers to take video and stream it live back to an iPad for a multicam shoot. The updated Final Cut 2 app allows users to can control each Final Cut Camera-running device connected to it with a multiscreen view. Users can switch between production and editing anytime to live-cut their projects in the new version.
It’s becoming clear that deterministic physics cannot easily answer all aspects of nature, at astronomical and biological level. Is this a limitation in modern mathematics and/or tools. Or an actual barrier?
The 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞-𝐁𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 is one of the most enduring challenges in celestial mechanics, addressing the complex motion of three celestial bodies interacting under gravity. Governed by Newton’s laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, it seeks to predict the paths of the bodies based on their masses, positions, and velocities. While the Two-Body Problem has exact solutions described by Kepler’s laws, introducing a third body leads to a nonlinear system of equations with no general analytical solution. This complexity arises from the chaotic interactions between the bodies, where even minute changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different trajectories—a key aspect of chaos theory.
Historically, the Three-Body Problem has fascinated some of the greatest scientific minds. Isaac Newton laid its foundation, but it was Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Leonhard Euler who discovered specific cases with periodic or predictable solutions. Lagrange identified the Lagrange points, stable positions where the gravitational forces and motion of the three bodies balance, while Euler found collinear solutions, where the bodies align on a single line periodically. These solutions, though special cases, have profound implications for space exploration, such as identifying stable regions for satellites orbits.
Despite the chaotic nature of the Three-Body Problem, researchers have discovered periodic solutions where the bodies follow repetitive paths, returning to their original positions after a fixed time. In the 1970s, Michel Hénon, Roger A. Broucke, and George Hadjidemetriou identified a fascinating family of such solutions, now known as the Broucke–Hénon–Hadjidemetriou family. These solutions often involve symmetric and elegant trajectories, such as the figure-eight orbit, where three equal-mass bodies chase each other along a shared path resembling the number eight.
Other periodic solutions include equilateral triangle configurations (where the bodies maintain a triangular shape while rotating or oscillating) and collinear periodic orbits (where the bodies periodically align and reverse directions). These solutions highlight the intricate balance between gravitational forces and motion, offering glimpses of stability within the chaos.
While the Three-Body Problem laid the groundwork for understanding gravitational interactions, the study of higher n-body problems reveals the rich and chaotic dynamics of larger systems, offering critical insights into both cosmic structures and practical applications like orbital dynamics.
Since spending a lot of time recently with SDXL I’ve since made my way back to SD 1.5
While the models overall have less fidelity. There is just no comparing to the current motion models we have available for animatediff with 1.5 models.
To date this is one of my favorite pieces. Not because I think it’s even the best it can be. But because the workflow adjustments unlocked some very important ideas I can’t wait to try out.
Performance by @silkenkelly and @itxtheballerina on IG
A measure of how large the object appears to an observer looking from that point. Thus. A measure for objects in the sky. Useful to retuen the size of the sun and moon… and in perspective, how much of their contribution to lighting. Solid angle can be represented in ‘angular diameter’ as well.
A solid angle is expressed in a dimensionless unit called a steradian (symbol: sr). By default in terms of the total celestial sphere and before atmospheric’s scattering, the Sun and the Moon subtend fractional areas of 0.000546% (Sun) and 0.000531% (Moon).
On earth the sun is likely closer to 0.00011 solid angle after athmospheric scattering. The sun as perceived from earth has a diameter of 0.53 degrees. This is about 0.000064 solid angle.
The mean angular diameter of the full moon is 2q = 0.52° (it varies with time around that average, by about 0.009°). This translates into a solid angle of 0.0000647 sr, which means that the whole night sky covers a solid angle roughly one hundred thousand times greater than the full moon.
The apparent size of an object as seen by an observer; expressed in units of degrees (of arc), arc minutes, or arc seconds. The moon, as viewed from the Earth, has an angular diameter of one-half a degree.
The angle covered by the diameter of the full moon is about 31 arcmin or 1/2°, so astronomers would say the Moon’s angular diameter is 31 arcmin, or the Moon subtends an angle of 31 arcmin.
