“Rasterizing Volumes and Surfaces for Crowds on Soul” by Ouellet, Garcia, Gustafson, Kuruc, Lorenzen, et al. …
Conference:
Type(s):
Entry Number: 30
Title:
- Rasterizing Volumes and Surfaces for Crowds on Soul
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
In order to produce shots with hundreds of multi-volume crowd characters for Soul, we could not rely on the same I/O heavy pose- cache pipeline used for the hero characters [Coleman et al. 2020]. Our rendering and systems teams rated the total necessary storage for the “soul world” at over 100 TBs for an average of two hero characters per shot.1 For expansive crowds of these characters to hit the same volumetric look while avoiding this I/O limitation, two new render-time technologies were developed. The first leveraged an existing volume rasterizer to pose volumes at render-time, informed by a lattice deformation. The second allowed for rasterization of surface primvars to be delivered to the volume shaders.
References:
Patrick Coleman, Laura Murphy, Markus Kranzler, and Max Gilbert. 2020. Making Souls: Methods and a Pipeline for Volumetric Characters. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Talks (SIGGRAPH ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2.
Robert L. Cook, John Halstead, Maxwell Planck, and David Ryu. 2007. Stochastic Simplification of Aggregate Detail. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers (San Diego, California) (SIGGRAPH ’07). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 79–es. https://doi.org/10.1145/1275808.1276476
Julian Fong, Magnus Wrenninge, Christopher Kulla, and Ralf Habel. 2017. Production Volume Rendering: SIGGRAPH 2017 Course. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses (Los Angeles, California) (SIGGRAPH ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 2, 79 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3084873.3084907
Magnus Wrenninge. 2016. Efficient Rendering of Volumetric Motion Blur Using Temporally Unstructured Volumes. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 5, 1 (31 January 2016), 1–34. http://jcgt.org/published/0005/01/01/
Jane Yen, Stephen Gustafson, Aaron Lo, J. D. Northrup, and Lana Sun. 2018. Other Worldly Crowds in Coco. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Talks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) (SIGGRAPH ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 19, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3214745.3214796
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Magnus Wrenninge for the development of REVES, Julian Fong and Stephen Friedman for RenderMan support, Michael Rice for Field3D support, Steve LaVietes for Katana support, and Frankie Eder for geometry rasterizer optimizations.
