| Q&A |
 Matt
Taylor
CTO Holomatix Ltd,
June 2008 |
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“
One of our principles is that Rendition's "finished
product" is always the same image you would get
from a production render, whether you're running an
interactive session, or rendering a sequence offline.
For example, one of our customers has Rendition running
on an 100 core render farm, and they get great performance
from it. (They tell us it's like having a 500 core render
farm for one fifth of the cost) ”
<
Rendition in action |
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| Q1 |
Please
give a brief description of Rendition. |
| A1 |
Rendition
is a raytracing renderer, which is compatible with mental ray
files from Maya, 3ds Max and XSI. One of it's main advantages
is that it raytraces in realtime, progressively refining an
image, allowing an artist to get an instant view of how their
final render will look. This eliminates loads of waiting around,
and is great for tweaking materials, moving lights etc. In addition,
the progressive image will converge to a final production quality
image.
Rendition comes with plug-ins for Maya and Max, and an XSI plug-in
is planned. The Maya plug-in is the most advanced, allowing
edits being made to the scene (lighting, materials, geometry,
in fact almost everything) to update in the rendered view immediately,
in real time. The Max plug-in is less advanced at present, but
still allows a scene to be rendered in Rendition at the click
of a button. For the time being in XSI, you need to export an
.mi file and just drag it into Rendition's main window, and
you're away. |
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| Q2 |
What
kind of speed gain can Rendition achieve compared to mental
ray? |
| A2 |
 This
varies, but we've seen lots of real world scenes that complete
5 or 6 times faster than they do in mental ray. However this
is only half the story, because in addition to that speedup
factor, Rendition renders progressively, so if you're just looking
to check how something looks in your scene, you might get your
answer in 1/100th the time it would take with mental ray. |
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| Q3 |
3d
artist who want to take advantage of Rendition should have a
very fast CPU or an high-end graphic card? |
| A3 |
Fast
CPU, definitely. We don't use graphics hardware at the moment
(though that may change). Get Rendition fired up on a quad core,
and the realtime control you can get really is amazing! |
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| Q4 |
We
have made some test with .mi files generated by Softimage XSI
6 and get very fast results with Rendition ; but what are the
advantage of using Rendition compared to Softimage render region? |
| A4 |
I
think it will depend on the scene. If your scene is quick to
render anyway, there probably won't be much difference, due
to the overhead of exporting the .mi file and dragging it into
Rendition etc. However if it's taking a while to render even
your sub region, then it's definitely worth using Rendition.
We've put loads of effort into getting an image up on screen
as quickly as possible, even with "hard" scenes. Of
course, if it wasn't for Rendition's lacking an XSI plug-in,
it would be a no-brainer, and that's definitely something we'll
put right in the future. By the way, Rendition also supports
an equivalent of render regions - just hold down shift and drag
the mouse over part of the image in Rendition, and it will get
prioritized in the rendering, and once completed, the rest of
the scene will continue to render to production quality. |
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| Q5 |
Could
you please explain how Rendition can help 3d artist enhance
their work? What kind of new workflow do Rendition propose? |
| A5 |
First
and foremost, there's the instant feedback. When you can immediately
see the effect of a change, it allows you much finer control.
It saves you loads of time, but more than that, it gives you
a new level of finesse when you're tweaking things.
Then, of course there are the output channels. These can be
a great time saver - Rendition can make you depth maps, normal
maps, a shader or object id channel, and split your render into
specular and diffuse passes, all automatically. That's actually
been a really popular addition with artists we've talked to
- it's more time saved from repetitive tasks, really.
Finally, there's the fact that if you are rendering out production
images, the artist may be doing this on their own machine, or
on a company render farm. In the first case, Rendition provides
big savings in the time to complete a render, so you get your
machine back sooner. For render farm use, Rendtion integrates
well with existing render farms. It exists for Windows, Linux
and Mac and in 32 bit and 64 bit versions, it can be run from
a single network location on all machines, which makes installation
trivial, and is easy to use with standard render farm management
tools (plug-ins for Smedge and Deadline already exist). |
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| Q6 |
Can
Rendition be used for production images? |
| A6 |
Absolutely
(see previous answer). One of our principles is that Rendition's
"finished product" is always the same image you would
get from a production render, whether you're running an interactive
session, or rendering a sequence offline. For example, one of
our customers has Rendition running on an 100 core render farm,
and they get great performance from it. (They tell us it's like
having a 500 core render farm for one fifth of the cost). |
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| Q7 |
Rendition
brings almost "realtime raytracing" ; do you think
that this technology can be used for tomorrow interactive 3d
: games, 3d walthrough? |
| A7 |
I
think raytracing will definitely become the standard technique
for realtime applications like games in a few years. For example,
Intel's Larrabee, from what I've read, will be a many core x86
CPU with loads of GPU type vector extensions, and that's just
a raytracer's dream! Raytracing is an expensive technique, but
once it can be done quickly enough, rasterisation and its endless
hacks don't really stand a chance.
As far as 3D walkthroughs go, right now Rendition can do them.
It's just a question of how much it can refine the image at
an interactive framerate. We have plans to co-opt multiple networked
machines into generating realtime views of a scene - it's very
scalable process, and I think the results will be really exciting. |
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| Q8 |
3D
artist can already try for free the beta version of Rendition.
What do they say? |
| A8 |
I
think people are really excited about it. They love the realtime
feedback. One artist, for example, had to position his camera
view so that a reflected highlight was just so, in a certain
place. Now that's a textbook example of where Rendition turns
a laborious process of trial and error, into a task that just
takes moments - so he was very happy. I'm also grateful that
3D artists have shown a real willingness to work with us on
improving Rendition's performance. You need that really, because
people need to trust their renderer, and making sure it always
produces the right results takes a lot of testing. When we first
released a version to the public, we were amazed by all the
different things people were trying it with. |
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