“Practical uses of a ray tracer for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” by Dimian and Herbst
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Practical uses of a ray tracer for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Session/Category Title: Rendering
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
For the feature film ‘Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs’ we were presented with many lighting/rendering challenges that required us to adopt a new lighting pipeline. This new pipeline would use Arnold, a ray tracing renderer with global illumination that could provide interactive feedback to the artist. The pipeline needed to work with large data sets and provide clever ways to speed up indirect lighting, refraction, and reflection, humans with subsurface scattering skin and fine hair in complex scenes. The mix of graphic, stylized shapes, fine patterns of texture, and extreme ranges in color and contrast required the use of non-traditional ray tracing methods with hardware and software development for interactive feedback for the lighting artists. Ray tracing with global illumination provides great photorealistic effects, but often at a cost due to poor anti-aliasing, lack of flexibility, and the inability to mix non-photorealistic techniques into a single render.
