 | | | Story about Rendertime - RE: OGL acceleration question | Story about Rendertime - RE: OGL acceleration question 2004-06-08 - By Rick Walia
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Ed has a sgi box in house that's the size of my refrigerator. I bet it renders a
sphere in same time my dual <insert modern fast processor> does.
His sgi box can be also be used a table for 4 whereas my workstation can barely
hold up as a foot rest :P
Quoting Michael Klein <forum@(protected)>:
> A magical number in 1989 at a company which used the hardware PIXAR
> renderman metal cube with 2 proc boards was max. 5 minutes per frame. It
> wasn't allowed to render in higher times per frame because of the big amount
> of costs they had to control. 4 seconds of a complex animation we would
> laugh about today cost up to EUR 120.000. There was no raytracing with
> shadows or refraction possible within the time and budget. Unlocking drop
> shadows with Alias 2.5 was forbidden to use for production. A stupid picture
> on my AMIGA 1000 rendered 16 hours. Crap. Inefficent.
>
> In 1992 I started to work with a Personal Iris. Thanks, Big Bang! Because
> trained by extreme limitation rules of my AMIGA 1000 I made a big jump
> forward but found out very fast that even this dream machine had its limits
> ... reached very fast. So a complex scene was something with 150.000
> pologons and a damn tiny thumbnail flipbook (nice icon on a OS X desktop) of
> something (I thought it was) complex took days to render. I remember my
> diploma working time. 12 days day and night for a 8 seconds trailer. I took
> the hardware at home to have the chance to finish the trailer in time under
> nerd conditions. So the final rendering was 45 minutes per frame. I had to
> find other Softimage user which could help me out.
>
> The next step was the nice Indigo Extreme. A big step forward but I learned
> the main 3D rule: once you have the faster machine you will play around with
> all those little forbidden road show features (and turn them off later one
> day before the deadline).
>
> A big multiprocessor Onyx with some Indigo's in a network destroyed all my
> sensibility for AA settings and other stuff in 1995. Especially if you
> didn't bought the stuff. So it was getting normal to turn on everything
> before starting the rendering. O.K. ... nice luxury ... but what will happen
> if you are forced to go back from Porsche to Beetle. Freeze!
>
> And even how fast your hardware is ... you think: if I only had more CPU
> power it would take minutes to finish this job ... but that's an illusion.
>
> Today our VR ammo which is just a bunch of 9 2,8 GHz CPU's take hours to
> render a 12 pass 500.000 polygon mobile phone animation. Sometimes I have
> the feeling: are we doing something wrong here? Is is probably getting to
> much overdone to split every project into layers instead of just rendering a
> single one? Is this the opposite C64-Syndrome (I mean: the more advanced the
> hardware is, the more inefficient it will be used or programmed ... wasting
> RAM and Power).
>
> I'm not sure 100% anymore ... in my point of view the way of different
> working makes sense and it's some kind of solving the problem professional
> using special knowledge, skills and a very special tool. But does the client
> really understand why a 12 layer mobile phone will render many hours on a
> fast little farm to get a multilayer high quality post-controlable result?
> The most bugging question is: why so complicated ... why not rendering just
> one simple, clean and perfect layer ... (I'm tired about explaining it again
> and again ...). It's not so easy anymore to impose those Stone Age guys out
> of the Valley of the Unknowing.
>
> The good thing with faster technology is: we set AA to 1 3 if something is
> still flickering and we don't care ... but the negative thing is the
> feeling: wasn't that too easy? Is 10 minutes per frame probably waste of CPU
> time? Why does this little thing fill up my 2GB of RAM?
>
> I don't know ... probably routine-blinded by the high speed growth of
> technology.
>
> (just my thoughts during a little break)
>
> President
>
> -- --Original Message-- --
>
> From: owner-xsi@(protected) [mailto:owner-xsi@(protected)
> <mailto:owner-xsi@(protected)> ] On Behalf Of kim aldis
> Posted At: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 5:44 PM
> Posted To: XSI
> Conversation: OGL acceleration question - RE: +++ Slower Rendering in XSI
> 4.0 +++
> Subject: RE: OGL acceleration question - RE: +++ Slower Rendering in XSI 4.0
> +++
>
> in the past 25 years, I've seen my frame times go from around 20 minutes per
> frame to, well, around 20 minutes per frame. We just want more.
>
> Something Loren Carpenter said a good few years ago was that he felt render
> times were limited rather more by any given person's attention span than by
> the power of the hardware and I think that still stands up. Maybe the time
> will come but I rather doubt it.
>
> Carpenter also has an interesting story about his first presentation of the
> ray tracing work he was doing way back when - he was one of the original
> developers of ray tracing for image synthesis. He was presenting to
> management at, I think, IBM, who were wowed. So much so that one of them
> asked what he'd need to do it in real time - remember, this was some 20
> years ago. Carpenter thought for a moment, then said, "I'd like a helicopter
> and 768*576 Crays in a field with a red, green and blue lightbulb on the top
> of each one".
>
> Respect.
>
>
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