“Volume Rendering for Pixar’s Elemental” by Fong
Conference:
Type(s):
Interest Area:
- Production & Animation
Title:
- Volume Rendering for Pixar's Elemental
Session/Category Title: Sampling Volumes and Surfaces
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
This work presents recent updates to volume rendering in RenderMan, the production renderer used at Pixar. With the advent of increasingly complicated volumetric assets such as those seen in Pixar’s films Soul and Elemental, our aggregate volume renderer required changes to handle complex water based characters; optimizations for complicated scenes; better handling of transform blur; and improved support for volumetric matte holdouts. These changes allowed us to render an immense number of complicated and detailed volumetric characters in Elemental.
References:
[1] Per Christensen, Julian Fong, Jonathan Shade, 2018. RenderMan: An Advanced Path-Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering. ACM Transactions on Graphics 37 (08 2018), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3182162
[2] Julian Fong, Magnus Wrenninge, Christopher Kulla, and Ralf Habel. 2017. Production Volume Rendering: Siggraph 2017 Course. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses. 1–79.
[3] Ryusuke Villemin and Christophe Hery. 2013. Practical Illumination from Flames. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 2, 2 (31 December 2013), 142–155.
[4] Magnus Wrenninge and Ryusuke Villemin. 2020. Product Importance Sampling of the Volume Rendering Equation using Virtual Density Segments. Technical Note 20-01. Pixar Animation Studios. https://graphics.pixar.com/library/CandidateSampling/paper.pdf
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