nemesis wrote:
> Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
>> I absolutely loved it :)
>>
>> And speaking of Pixar, I read recently that Cars was entirely raytraced :)
> 
> Not sure.  Renderman is capable of raytracing, but its main pipeline is a kind
> of scanline:  REYES.

I'm aware of REYES, and the fact that previous movies were mostly 
scanline rendered, with some raytracing thrown in.  What I read was 
actually that Cars was their first movie to be entirely raytraced, 
meaning they didn't use the scanline renderer at all for it :)

Granted, the author could have been wrong about that.

>  Besides, I think in the DVD they said the reflections on
> the cars were limited to 2 or 3 bounces, not to bog it down indefinitely.

That has nothing to do with whether or not it's raytraced.  In fact, 
POV-Ray lets you do this, too :)

>> (Side note of trivia: Each frame of Toy Story took about 10 minutes to
>> render, each frame of Cars took about 15 hours!)
> 
> Really?!  Even with all the better hardware?! :)

Yup.  If you wanted to render a 2 hour movie in one year on a single 
computer, that would yield 3 min 2.5 sec per frame.  This lets us make 
an educated guess about the size of their render farm.

Assuming they finished their final render in one year (8760 hours 
processor time):
Toy Story: 3.28 Computers
Cars: 295.9 Computers

Assuming the final render finished in one month (720 hours processor time):
Toy Story: 39.3 Computers
Cars: 3550.8 Computers

Assuming the final render finished in one week (168 hours processor time):
Toy Story: 171 Computers
Cars: 15429 Computers

I think the actual number of computers at their disposal was something 
like 40-50 for Toy Story (though I'm probably remembering this wrong). 
I have no idea how many they used for Cars; it's conceivable at this 
point that they have server farms of hundreds or thousands.

Of course, all the rendering isn't done straight through like that; the 
artists do their daily work, and then submit their jobs for overnight 
rendering (generating the digital equivalent of film dailies), so the 
movie effectively gets rendering throughout the entire production cycle 
of ~2years.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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