Design and implementation of modern production renderers

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, production rendering has moved from primarily using Reyes-based algorithms to being based on path tracing and physically based approaches. The developers of five of the most significant production renderers have each recently written comprehensive systems papers on their renderers, describing the challenges of modern production rendering and the systems they have respectively built to solve them. In May 2018, these papers were published in a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics.

In this panel, the developers of these renderers will go into depth on how the challenges of production rendering have influenced the systems they've built and how they have developed new techniques to make path tracing viable in practice. These systems are remarkably varied in some of their core design decisions; the panelists will also compare and contrast their own design decisions with respect to topics like precomputation versus runtime computation, RGB versus spectral rendering, and out-of-core rendering versus requiring scene geometry to fit into memory.

References

1. Brent Burley, David Adler, Matt Jen-Yuan Chiang, Hank Driskill, Ralf Habel, Patrick Kelly, Peter Kutz, Yining Karl Li, and Daniel Teece. 2018. The Design and Evolution of Disney's Hyperion Renderer. ACM Transactions on Graphics 37, 3 (May 2018).
2. Per Christensen, Julian Fong, Jonathan Shade, Wayne Wooten, Brenden Schubert, Andrew Kensler, Stephen Friedman, Charlie Kilpatrick, Cliff Ramshaw, Marc Bannister, Brenton Rayner, Jonathan Brouillat, and Max Liani. 2018. RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering. ACM Transactions on Graphics 37, 3 (May 2018).
3. Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, and Edwin Catmull. 1987. The Reyes image rendering architecture. Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH) (Aug. 1987), 95--102.
4. Luca Fascione, Johannes Hanika, Mark Leone, Marc Droske, Jorge Schwarzhaupt, Tomas Davidovic, Andrea Weidlich, and Johannes Meng. 2018. Manuka: A batch-shading architecture for spectral path tracing in movie production. ACM Transactions on Graphics 37, 3 (May 2018).
5. Iliyan Georgiev, Thiago Ize, Mike Farnsworth, Ramón Montoya-Vozmediano, Alan King, Brecht Van Lommel, Angel Jimenez, Oscar Anson, Shinji Ogaki, Eric Johnston, Adrien Herubel, Declan Russell, Frederic Servant, and Marcos Fajardo. 2018. Arnold: A Brute-force Production Path Tracer. ACM Transactions on Graphics 37, 3 (May 2018).
6. James T. Kajiya. 1986. The rendering equation. Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH) (1986), 143--150.
7. Christopher Kulla, Alejandro Conty, Clifford Stein, and Larry Gritz. 2018. Sony Pictures Imageworks Arnold. ACM Transactions on Graphics 37, 3 (May 2018).

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Rendering

      • Ray tracing