Friday, August 13, 2010

Arnold is back!




During the last Siggraph, a lot of presentations were centered around Arnold, the production renderer which is going to kick Renderman's and mental ray's collective asses. The VFX industry is slowly discovering this marvel, which is doing Monte Carlo path tracing at incredible speeds. It eats huge complex scenes with motion blur and DOF for breakfast.

The argument that ray tracing is only used sparingly in the movie industry no longer holds, as almost all big film companies are shifting towards more and more (and sometimes full) raytracing as the method of choice. I'm sure this industry wide shift will trickle down to the game industry as well

Some interviews and presentations:

interview Marcos Fajardo: http://tog.acm.org/resources/RTNews/html/rtnv23n1.html#art3

HPG2009 Larry Gritz talking about Arnold: http://www.larrygritz.com/docs/HPG2009-Gritz-Keynote-clean.pdf

more on Larry Gritz' talk: http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/hpg-2009-report/

interesting interview wiht Larry Gritz about the decision to move to Arnold: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10306215-23.html

basic features of Arnold: http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~jaroslav/gicourse2010/giai2010-02-marcos_fajardo-slides.pdf

many details on Arnold (don't miss this one): http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-shading-course/martinez/s2010_course_notes.pdf

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