Pixar recently released RenderMan version 24. The highlight of this release is a new CPU + GPU hybrid renderer called RenderMan XPU. Pixar says that XPU has been designed for look development and to provide a good match to RenderMan's production pathtracer, RIS. XPU can handle the scale and complexity of Pixar’s feature animation projects. Pixar’s next-gen rendering engine can … Read more
SiliconArts today announced a development agreement with Pixilica for its next-generation Monti Carlo RayCore graphics architecture, Pixilica is a RISC-V developer.
(Source: Epic) Epic has made some major improvements and upgrades to its popular game engine, Unreal. With the release of Unreal Engine 4.25, Epic has expanded the toolset to include content creation and editing for more areas of game and visualization development. Epic says their linear media tools are improved to enable even more immersive and efficient production of … Read more
Source: Francis Damm It was late July 2018, when Nvidia surprised and delighted the world with the introduction of its RTX GPU that could deliver real-time ray tracing, dubbed RTRT. If you build it, will they come? It was a gamble. Nvidia had to not only design and manufacture the chip, but they also had to build a toolset … Read more
Epic’s latest acquisition, Cubic Motion of Manchester, England, consolidates the work the two companies have been doing in virtual production. Game engines have been adapted for virtual production probably since at least 2013 or so. Tinkerers in film production were quietly playing with game engines as a tool for interactive capture with the advantage of realtime rendering so that filmmakers … Read more
Autodesk recently announced that Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU is available. First unveiled as a beta release in March, the company says Arnold 6 completes the Arnold GPU toolset with improvements across lights, shaders, and cameras, as well as on-demand texture loading and support for Open Shading Language (OSL) and OpenVDB volumes. Additionally, as part of Autodesk’s efforts for the … Read more
The latest release of Unity (2019.3) with High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) has been released. HDRP, says Unity, focuses on optimizations that can render resource-intensive visuals while maintaining constant, steady frame rates. With HDRP, claims Unity, creators can cut loose and make stunning projects without worrying about throttling graphics to optimize for low-end devices, enabling them to create jaw-dropping … Read more
Mari, the Foundry’s tool for texturing and paint was born of the film industry. It stands out for its ability to handle very large models and support very high-resolution textures. Its users are primarily content creators in the film industry, but it is staking a claim in industrial design thanks to its sibling Luxology, which is also a member of … Read more
Regular readers will recall that we have been following Adshir’s developments for a few years now. Each time we see them, they have made significant advances. Our last encounter was at Siggraph in LA, and we wrote all about that here. At a private showing, they demonstrated realtime, 4K ray tracing on a powerful laptop, realtime, 60 fps ray tracing … Read more
Chaos has been a leader in ray tracing since they started the company 21 years ago in Sofia, Bulgaria. Their program, V-Ray, has been used in innumerable designs and a dozen movies. Seeing the Chaos people at Siggraph was always enjoyable, but predictable—exchange a few jokes, see some beautiful pictures, make a date for drinks, break the date. Not this … Read more
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Scene rendered by MoonRay (with Embree): Property of DreamWorks Animation. At Intel’s inaugural Create event at Siggraph 2019, the company outlined its vision for rendering with exascale computing and oneAPI, and reiterated its six-pillars. Jim Jeffers, Intel’s senior principal engineer and director of Advanced Rendering and Visualization, took the stage and … Read more
The Corona Renderer developed by Chaos Czech is a leading renderer for architectural visualization. Image by Jesus Selvera. (Source: Corona Group) In the world of Chaos, one press release is never enough. No, the company sends them out like little soldiers one after the other. Most recently, Chaos Czech, formerly the Render Legion group which was acquired by Chaos … Read more
