Intel and DreamWorks Working On Rendering Animation In Real-Time 114
PolygamousRanchKid writes "This week while speaking at the Techonomy conference, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told audience members that they'd formulated the solution for real-time rendering of animation for video. Katzenberg told the audience that they'd been working hand-in-hand with Intel in order to rewrite their software to take advantage of scalable multi-core processors, this allowing them to achieve advances that will, for lack of a better term, revolutionize the animation process."
Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Funny)
Because we all want them to pump out more Shrek films as fast as possible amirite?
Now I have to eat lunch, again.
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Yeah I can't wait for the magic mirror's own story. That'll be scraping the bottom.
Considering Shrek the 3rd for high concentrations of pure awfulness I thought they'd already passed through the bottom and were taking a crack at bedrock beneath the barrel
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No kidding. It's less that they need faster animation rendering, than that they need better stories.
Learn from your competition - don't crank out crap just because it'll "sell", make sure you're on the right track to make something good every time. Pixar hasn't had a dud yet, and they freely admit to taking a number of their stories back to formula because someone said "hey this doesn't seem to be working" rather than pushing ahead with something crappy.
Oh, one other thing: STOP it with the "must end with a
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What better reason is there to crank out crap?
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"don't crank out crap just because it'll 'sell'"
What better reason is there to crank out crap?
True that! As long as they make millions of dollars per turd they'll churn out as much "crap" as possible. I don't blame them, I'd like to make millions of dollars.
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True that! As long as they make millions of dollars per turd they'll churn out as much "crap" as possible. I don't blame them, I'd like to make millions of dollars.
Luckily there are some people who put producing quality work above making money.
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Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this has the potential to make animation more like live-action film. A director woking with live actors can order more takes if he's not getting the performances he needs from his actors or the shot's composition is less than perfect. This system sounds like it might give animators the same direct feedback, allowing them to more easily compose those perfect shots,
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The sad thing is that we are talking Intel here. Both AMD and NVIDIA are so far ahead of Intel when it comes to rendering technologies, you have to wonder if Intel is just throwing money at Dreamworks to experiment with stuff Intel has. Do you REALLY think that Dreamworks would have initiated that relationship when there are better alternatives available?
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Then why not just skip the whole animation process, and shoot live action?
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Plus, I heard a rumor that once they get all of Cameron Diaz's moves, they'll throw her out of acting altogether and use the computer version for pennies on the dollar! PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!
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You honestly don't believe they don't have the entire thing storyboarded and written BEFORE they even get as far as starting rendering?
Please.
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Written yes, storyboarded, probably not. In fact, storyboards are on the way out - the new hotness is animatics - basically low-res renderings of the scene. Unlike a storyboard, which is a flat static comic-like picture, an animatic actually details the motion, which can include stuff like camera angles and such.
Of course, this stuff is very crude so it can be rendered in a
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Maybe we could see more animated boobs.
Speaking of which....animating boobs seems to be incredibly hard. Does anyone have good resources on realistically animated boobs?
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It's so they can rip off Pixar stories faster.
Wish Pixar would learn something from Apple and stop announcing their movies 4 years in advance. Only takes Dreamworks about a year to churn out their knock-offs.
I'll never forgive them for killing Newt.
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And it's signed through 2016!
But yes, given that South Park has a 1 week turnover time for each episode this appears to be a technology that they could take huge advantage of. That would give them a lot more time to polish their turds that they drop off on people's heads.
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Dreamworks said they aren't doing any more Shrek movies. Yeah right. I am sure they will be back later. There is that spin off right now.
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notice how something like Bambi or Fantasia didn't NEED constant pop culture references?
Notice how much funnier Shrek is than either of those?
Realtime animation not new (Score:2)
But as it would be in final production, with today's level of detail, that would be pretty cool.
Probably have to chain down the voice actors, though it you want the full effect.
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Yeah my first thought was "Why are animators rendering their sequences instead of just using the GPU viewports?
Then I remembered that he had been talking this up in regards to Larabee last year. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement in parallelism. I'm working on the side for Caustic Graphics which is also working on a hardware card to make rendering more parallel and efficient. And I'm sure they would also love to get their hands on Knights Trail. But I don't know that Dreamworks is "revolu
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Well, in the story on Knights trail, Intel said a select few companies got some of the existing prototypes. Guess we know the name of one of those companies.
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Right but a Lighting TD isn't an animator. ;)
The quote was that it takes animators a few days per 2 seconds of animation. *Animators* shouldn't need more than GPU lighting.
Interactive lighting is a god-sent. I just used it on a TV spot a couple months ago for the first time with Brazil 3 and it was like upgrading to a car from a tricycle. Now I never want to go back to adjust, re-render, adjust, rerender ever again.
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Why are you focused in animated movies? Think about how this technology can be extended out.
South Park. They have a 1 week turnover per episode.
How about if they can scale this technology out to the gaming market? That article points this out. Rendering is the road block to obtaining better and more realistic environments you need progressively beefier GPU to render more complex environments. Maybe if this technology takes off you will be able to see a reduction in the power requirements of GPUs that is mor
GOOD LUCK (Score:1)
Are they going to remake Toy Story with the Crysis engine?
Re:GOOD LUCK (Score:4, Funny)
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Are they going to remake Toy Story with the Crysis engine?
Toy Story Goes To War?
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Wrist Straing (Score:5, Funny)
Homer: Uh, I guess. Is this episode going on the air live?
June Bellamy: No, Homer. Very few cartoons are broadcast live. It's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists.
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Well, it could be kinda cool for an interplanetary chat link - transmit a compressed description of the character's parameters (joints, facial muscles, etc.) and then render at the destination.
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Didn't they do that in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep for low bandwidth intership communication?
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Haha, I was thinking of the one where Homer invests in Animotion myself.
Management discovered SMP and threading... (Score:2)
So management finally discovered SMP and threading about 20 years or so after it was introduced onto the types of systems all of these outfits have been using since the beginning of time?
Sedate this fellow before he starts to perpetrate some more "management".
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So management finally discovered SMP and threading about 20 years or so after it was introduced onto the types of systems all of these outfits have been using since the beginning of time?
Sedate this fellow before he starts to perpetrate some more "management".
No need.
As good animation is dependent upon good writing and good voice work, all this could do is bring even lower quality animated items to the masses. Seems to me, when I look over the total production time of any feature (despite the apparent cookie-cutter approach to movies) the writing takes up a tremendous amount of time. Perhaps a gifted ad-libber could do something well, making it up as he/she goes along, but you don't see a lot of those.
More likely to be of use in the board room or training than
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Perhaps its aimed at "shovelware" kids cartoons rather than movies... How high end does "scooby doo" animation have to be to get kids to watch?
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Much better. My six year old has grown tired of Scooby Doo. She much prefers Bill Nye and Fetch! with Ruf Ruffman. On a side note, at least I can stand to be in the same room when she gets to watch TV.
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Much better. My six year old has grown tired of Scooby Doo. She much prefers Bill Nye and Fetch! with Ruf Ruffman. On a side note, at least I can stand to be in the same room when she gets to watch TV.
Great example.
As another, I'd like to direct your attention to the last cartoons Warner Brother Brothers / Looney Tunes, up to 1969. I have many of these on DVD and they're pretty depressing to watch, compared to the wonderfully thoughtful cartoons of the 40's and 50's (Hillbilly Hare squaredance was inspired by the craze of Square Dancing in Hollywood at the time, attened my many of the studio's production crew - inspired!)
Just gluing together pretty scenes with no interesting narrative won't do much, but
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Not sure about kids, but apparently adults will watch even the worst animation that is put on the cartoon network at night.
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I think what they mean is most of these animators may have had a top of the line 4-6core cpu that could only do 60-100gflops/socket, are now going to have access to a 50 core cpu add-in card that can do 1tflop.
When you get a sudden change like that, you need some professional help to take advantage of it.
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Well I think they're referring to writing code for Intel's MIC (Knights Tail). Which acts pretty differently from writing for a single CPU. It acts more like a computer cluster of networked computers than a multicore cpu.
Also even with threading and SMP renderers have problems with parallel tasks when you start ray-tracing since each ray spawns more rays and those rays spawn rays and keeping track of them and loading the correct memory into L1,2 and 3 cache causes delays. You might start with 12 rays whi
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Rotoscope? (Score:2)
"allowing them to achieve advances that will, for lack of a better term, revolutionize the animation process."
Maybe he's hinting at live realtime rotoscoping?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping [wikipedia.org]
If you're unfamiliar with the technique watch the drug film "a scanner darkly".
This would be completely appropriate for a live event like the republican debate; I don't think those guys make sense without being on "substance D" anymore. (note I used to be a hard core "R" before they went completely batshit insane a decade or so ago, so I'm allowed to talk about "us" using that kind of language)
Re:Rotoscope? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, think more along the idea of Rango [imdb.com] - an animated film that used human actors as guides for the animators in terms of facial expressions and posing. Took quite a while to do.
Hopefully this will bring some creativity to the genre as opposed to simply cranking out more Shrek reruns.
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"Rango" was more motion capture and translating to CGI animation. "A Scanner Darkly" was rotoscoped.
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Well, yes, but I don't think what Dreamworks is doing now is rotoscoping.
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Isn't this the "Mars Needs Moms" look that bombed so badly just recently?
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Subchannel animation of live events... (Score:2)
Use a Kinect to do the motion capture and interface it with this and everything, even live action news can have the look and feel of a Dreamworks picture.....
Re:skinable TV (Score:2)
That would actually be pretty damn cool if I could have Morbo doing the news for me, other people watching the same news feed could have different avatars reading their news for them.
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Now all animators are game developers? (Score:2)
Real time rendering can only be a human animator pipeline productivity tool, not a production rendering technique. Otherwise your render farm is 100% idle unless someone is changing something, so you're wasting virtually all your time and rendering power that could be going towards better quality. Slow rendering gives the hardware something productive to do while the humans are thinking/sleeping.
I think Avatar claimed they spent something like 40 hours on each frame, so no way are we going from hours/frame
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Then again the 3D in Avatar was so good I would describe it as hallucinatory. Remember, it wasn't filmed on location, because it's location didn't exist anywhere except in a computer. 40 hours each frame for that actually seems reasonable when you look at the final product.
The animation in the Incredibles or other animated films isn't anywhere close to the graphics of Avatar and I'm sure that that kind of animation could be rendered in real time. As it is Team Fortress 2 looks very much like the Incredi
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Or, the current state-of-the-art becomes the live GPU render preview they work from, and the server-farm still renders an even-higher quality animation. 40 hours per frame is probably an average of all the human hours spent - including modeling and texturing - which won't be sped up by this. You can imagine that if it were 40 hours per frame, then anything over 30 seconds would take years just to render.
Real need is realtime editing not rendering (Score:1)
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"The collaboration with Intel is bring us just that."
I've been seeing some nice AMD ads in the credits of animated movies lately.
Intel: "what can we do?"
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Seeing the world as a cartoon might be great.
This actually came up in conversation the other day.
Friend A: Seeing the world as a cartoon might be great.
Friend B: I recommend a dosage of 200mcg.
Which is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone actually feel like watching the video to see what the claim is?
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Re:Which is it? (Score:5, Funny)
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What's the difference?
If you make $100 per week, and they raise your pay by 50-70 percent you make $150-170. If they raise your pay by 50-70 times, you make $5000-7000. A rather large difference if you ask me.
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7!=70
1.7x = Less then the gain you would expect any technology to make every year i.e. not news worthy
70x = Puts them 5 years ahead, in most industries dramatically changing their competitiveness i.e. news
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What's the difference?
Why is this modded funny?
Unless it's funny that most people think there isn't a difference between 50x faster and 50 percent faster.
I don't find that funny, i actually find that scarey.
Of course, maybe there's some internet MEME i'm missing here...
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Bad news article is bad.
Where is the bottleneck? (Score:2)
The detail needed to make it 4K and 8K ready needs many new Intel boxes?
Or is it just a huge set of current product been linked together with some old distributed computing protocol at very new hardware prices?
Old news, blender can do this already! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually blender can do this in 2 ways!
Since last Blender Conference last October, Cycles has been announced as the new render for Blender.
This is a realtime renderer that uses Progressive Rendering and can render realtime on CPU, GPU or both!
This can also be done for animation.
But this is possible for quite a while, since blender also can do OpenGL rendering realtime, and you can use the BGE as a realtime viewport.
So been there, done that, open sourced it
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I say (Score:2)
The more CPU time you got, the more quality. Real-time animation is not going to look as good as non-realtime animation. However, the good news of the article summary is that CPU's, and the algorithm they devised, are now fast enough for having real-time rendering that DreamWorks finds good enough to call animation quality! Nice.
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And that is the flaw, this obsession with what a CPU can do. GPU power isn't just about rendering, it has far greater computational power for many things than the CPU at this point(due to the different pixel pipelines). You want to see something, try checking the performance of Folding@Home with GPU vs. the best CPU version, and you will see why the CPU isn't always the best place to get work done.
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The problem with GPUs is how they get their performance and how that influences branching
GPUs organize their 1000+ cores into groups. Each group gets streamed the same instructions. Say you have 1600 cores and 8 groups with 200 cores per group. If even one core has a branch within a group, the other 199 cores in that group stall and wait for that core to merge back into the common instruction stream.
You can see how GPUs are great for some types of calculations and horrible for others. Intel's many core desi
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...Huh? Any cartoons which don't use 3D with a toon effect to look like 2D will be hand drawn. Whether it's on paper/cells or through the use of a tablet is another matter. It's not like we've advanced to the point we don't actually need artists drawing things anymore.
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The patent lawyers (Score:2)
probably have the paperwork filed already
Rendering speed maybe, animation speed, no (Score:2)
The animator still has to consider the movement they want to achieve, move the rig, adjust keyframes, etc., etc. This will always take time to do.
I'm not sure that rendering is necessarily the thing that most needs sped up for the artist. What would help the artist more is speeding up of things that require simulation such as hair, particles, fluids, physics, etc.
Rendering is just the button you
They talk about this tech helping to cross... (Score:2)
They already have it, its called an Nvidia GPU (Score:2)
There will never be a way to render out high quality renders in real time. There isnt enough processing in the world or ram to catch up to the production demands.
Global illumination models with indirect lighting, where multiple bounces occur throughout the scene... through glass, through motion blur... etc. Its just not going to happen. The amount of real time displacement mapping that is required is simply not possible. The ram processing demands are going to be ridiculous. Its why we cant render them out
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Mod parent up please.
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We're slowly creeping up on photo-realism in games. Once we hit that point, it won't matter if "production" quality is mathematically better, because the brain won't be able to perceive the difference.
At some point, the ability of the pixels will all be the same, it's the amount of pixels you can push that will be the difference. Production will have a benefit here as you can pre-render your scenes non-realtime to crazy high resolutions, but at some point we will also hit the limits of the human eye. Once w
Mostly for tweaking shaders, I expect (Score:2)
This isn't a problem for animators. Getting the models and motion right requires only the quality of a good graphics card. It's tweaking lighting, shaders, and post effects, the "look", that needs many repeats of full rendering. That's done by colorists and post people.
Why not use FPS game engines... (Score:1)
Why not just start using FPS game engines?
Don't most modern engines pretty much do this anyway on an interactive level? (scripting/setup of level aside)
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