Underwater God Rays from a Custom Volume Renderer

Peanut Butter Jelly, directed by Alexander Beaty, is a 51 second computer-animated short film produced by Digital Production Arts. The plot focuses on a fight sequence between a pirate jelly fish and a flyboy jelly fish over a peanut butter jar. The production demanded a photo-realistic computer generated underwater environment, which lead to the need for a custom built volume renderer to render high quality god rays. This thesis illustrates the requirement for a customized volume renderer for the production, the algorithm, and the implementation of the renderer. It also describes a tool created for Maya 2012 which gives the artist, artistic control to change the render settings

Volumetric Cloud Rendering: An Animation of Clouds

This paper demonstrates a production workflow for a volumetric-rendering-based short animation about clouds. The animation is based on the concept of a giant fish swimming in the sky from Zhuangzi\u27s philosophical story. The algorithm and implementation for the modeling and rendering of clouds are also presented. A renderer was developed that uses the OpenVDB library for data storage, fast retrieving and grid manipulation. A user-friendly pipeline was also developed for cloud modeling and rendering, which used Python and XML for adjusting rendering parameters. The pipeline includes Maya to build the rough cloud model and Houdini to calculate the interior light points. Final compositing was done in Nuke. Several MEL and Python scripts were also used to retrieve camera and light information from Maya and Houdini, thereby facilitating the production process

Interactive Video Game Content Authoring using Procedural Methods

This thesis explores avenues for improving the quality and detail of game graphics, in the context of constraints that are common to most game development studios. The research begins by identifying two dominant constraints; limitations in the capacity of target gaming hardware/platforms, and processes that hinder the productivity of game art/content creation. From these constraints, themes were derived which directed the research‟s focus. These include the use of algorithmic or „procedural‟ methods in the creation of graphics content for games, and the use of an „interactive‟ content creation strategy, to better facilitate artist production workflow. Interactive workflow represents an emerging paradigm shift in content creation processes used by the industry, which directly integrates game rendering technology into the content authoring process. The primary motivation for this is to provide „high frequency‟ visual feedback that enables artists to see games content in context, during the authoring process. By merging these themes, this research develops a production strategy that takes advantage of „high frequency feedback‟ in an interactive workflow, to directly expose procedural methods to artists‟, for use in the content creation process. Procedural methods have a characteristically small „memory footprint‟ and are capable of generating massive volumes of data. Their small „size to data volume‟ ratio makes them particularly well suited for use in game rendering situations, where capacity constraints are an issue. In addition, an interactive authoring environment is well suited to the task of setting parameters for procedural methods, reducing a major barrier to their acceptance by artists. An interactive content authoring environment was developed during this research. Two algorithms were designed and implemented. These algorithms provide artists‟ with abstract mechanisms which accelerate common game content development processes; namely object placement in game environments, and the delivery of variation between similar game objects. In keeping with the theme of this research, the core functionality of these algorithms is delivered via procedural methods. Through this, production overhead that is associated with these content development processes is essentially offloaded from artists onto the processing capability of modern gaming hardware. This research shows how procedurally based content authoring algorithms not only harmonize with the issues of hardware capacity constraints, but also make the authoring of larger and more detailed volumes of games content more feasible in the game production process. Algorithms and ideas developed during this research demonstrate the use of procedurally based, interactive content creation, towards improving detail and complexity in the graphics of games

Analyzing and Developing Aspects of the Artist Pipeline for Clemson University Art

Major digital production facilities such as Sony Pictures Imageworks, Pixar Animation studio, Walt Disney Animation Studio, and Epic Games use a production system called a pipeline. The term “pipeline” refers to the structure and process of data flow between the various phases of production from story to final edit. This paper examines current production pipeline practices in the Digital Production Arts program at Clemson University and proposes updates and modifications to the workflow. Additionally, this thesis suggests tools that are intended to improve the pipeline with artist-friendly interfaces and customizable integration between software and remote-production capabilities

Photorealistic physically based render engines: a comparative study

Pérez Roig, F. (2012). Photorealistic physically based render engines: a comparative study. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/14797.Archivo delegad

MeshPotato: A C++/Python API for Production Volumetric Rendering

MeshPotato is a production volume rendering API written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the creation of high quality volumetric effects such as fire, smoke, clouds and explosions. MeshPotato has been designed to be extensible and flexible for quick changes. Python bindings have been implemented with this library to allow for tools that are scripted and integrated within popular 3D modeling applications such as Maya and Houdini. The design of MeshPotato is discussed along with its plugin system, volume rendering API and some results from using the tool

An Investigation of How Lighting and Rendering Technology Affects Filmmaking Relative to Arnold’s Transition to a GPU-Based Path-Tracer

Computer Graphic (CGI) technology enables artists to explore a broad spectrum of approaches and styles, from photorealistic to abstract, expanding the boundaries of traditional aesthetic choices. Recent years have witnessed of 3D-CGI production shift towards greater physical fidelity driven by technological developments as well as consumer demand for realistic visuals; this trend can be found across various creative fields like film, video games, and virtual reality experiences with high-quality textures, lighting, rendering, and physics simulations providing enhanced levels of immersion for users. Arnold is one of the famous rendering engines assisting artists to be more creative while producing photorealistic images. Moreover, Arnold renders the engine as one of the main path-tracing renderers and contributes significantly to more fantastic photorealistic productions. Also, Arnold renders not only Support CPU render but also support GPU rendering to take full advantage of faster computation times and real-time interactivity, among many other advantages. Because of that, this study investigates how new technology like developed GPUs helps artists and filmmakers better comprehend 3D rendering solutions that impact their workflows. On the other hand, philosophically exploring the relationship between making a creative decision and technology within 3D photorealistic rendering reveals an intricate yet dynamic relationship that informs the creative processes of both independent artists and small studios alike. This interaction serves as a reminder that Art is driven forward by its creator\u27s creative energy rather than simply technological capabilities; artists and studios can continue pushing limits by embracing this complex dialogue between creativity and tech, opening new paths within digital Art\u27s fast-evolving realm

Image based surface reflectance remapping for consistent and tool independent material appearence

Physically-based rendering in Computer Graphics requires the knowledge of material properties other than 3D shapes, textures and colors, in order to solve the rendering equation. A number of material models have been developed, since no model is currently able to reproduce the full range of available materials. Although only few material models have been widely adopted in current rendering systems, the lack of standardisation causes several issues in the 3D modelling workflow, leading to a heavy tool dependency of material appearance. In industry, final decisions about products are often based on a virtual prototype, a crucial step for the production pipeline, usually developed by a collaborations among several departments, which exchange data. Unfortunately, exchanged data often tends to differ from the original, when imported into a different application. As a result, delivering consistent visual results requires time, labour and computational cost. This thesis begins with an examination of the current state of the art in material appearance representation and capture, in order to identify a suitable strategy to tackle material appearance consistency. Automatic solutions to this problem are suggested in this work, accounting for the constraints of real-world scenarios, where the only available information is a reference rendering and the renderer used to obtain it, with no access to the implementation of the shaders. In particular, two image-based frameworks are proposed, working under these constraints. The first one, validated by means of perceptual studies, is aimed to the remapping of BRDF parameters and useful when the parameters used for the reference rendering are available. The second one provides consistent material appearance across different renderers, even when the parameters used for the reference are unknown. It allows the selection of an arbitrary reference rendering tool, and manipulates the output of other renderers in order to be consistent with the reference