Interesting things for any 3D Model / Render People

[GnomeToys]

So Disney released the files needed to render one of the scenes from Moana here:

 

https://www.technology.disneyanimation.com/islandscene

 

The scene files are a 45GB download for basic scene and another 24GB for the animation for the Maya files.  Disney uses an internal render engine called Hyperion but other than that they don't mention requirements outside of something that can read .mel files or whatever Maya is capable of exporting these days (I should really ditch Max and learn that, Max has just been getting clunkier over the years).   The docs for the scene are some good reading even if you don't want / need a file that big to play with. 

 

I'm suspicious of whether my computer could render the thing given how iffy the memory management is in Max / Arnold.   I was able to crash that combo on my first scene by turning catmull-clark subdivision up to 11 on an object...  it dies on about 30GB of used memory trying to allocate another 24GB. 

 

They also have their open source stuff at https://www.technology.disneyanimation.com/collaboration-through-sharing

There's point cloud volume data for...  clouds available there too, which is a more reasonable size and contains high and low res versions at various point densities. 

 

Another cool item is AMD's physically based GPU/CPU renderer, which works on NVidia cards as well.  https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender/

I've been playing with this a little bit and the quality is impressive and render times are about 1/1000th what they would be for Arnold or Maxwell with the same scenes, although the light model isn't quite as accurate as Maxwell yet. 

 

 

 

For anyone wanting to get into this kind of stuff, Autodesk's student editions of all products are available to pretty much anyone with a university email, so if you have one or know somebody who will sign up for you there's 3 year free versions of everything that don't appear to have restrictions on render size or anything.   If you want to go a more programming-oriented route there's SideFX Houdini:

https://www.sidefx.com/

 

Pretty much any time you see some kind of ridiculously complicated particle effect or object motion in a movie, it was done in Houdini.   Disney used it heavily in that movie above, Industrial Light & Magic uses it (I suspect all the crazier looking shit in Doctor Strange was done with that), it was used for the bullet slowdown / stop effects in The Matrix, etc.   They have a free version with limited render size on their site, but the program is not easy to use.   It's all node-based procedural stuff and when the head of the company was asked how a beginner would learn how to use it in an interview he said he had no idea... lol.  There are a ton of tutorials available on their website which help.   Be aware if you mess with it that it's a lot like a programming language without a stable IDE;   you need to save a lot because it's not all that hard to crash the entire program by creating a procedural object with invalid parameters. 

 

Finally,

 

This is from the Senior Rigid Body Destruction / FX Technical Director at Industrial Light & Magic...   man that field is specialized as hell these days.  Also that job title is awesome. 

 

[GnomeToys]

If you're wanting to mess with Houdini (I have dreams of getting good enough with it one day to work with it for a living but don't have the required 10+ years to learn it) keep in mind the above is considered a "Beginner" tutorial in that it actually explains things, so it's as good a place to start looking at what you can do with the program as any...

[Fist 666]

I never got beyond various extensions in Revit and Sketchup for rendering, and eventually learned to hate all of them and now my BS Arch serves very little benefit to a job I'm really happy with, despite meh hourly wages.

[slo075]

Interesting, ill have a look into this already use a dozen other CAD software's daily....

[Joker]

I'm a daily user of Sketchup and Vray, mostly for architectural/environmental design work, but I've been interested in learning other programs that are more robust than Sketchup. I've dug into Rhino for a little bit but never got past the intro stages. Seemed really confusing but maybe after using it for a while it would seem second nature. 

 

Thanks for sharing!

[slo075]

On 11/3/2018 at 2:18 AM, Joker said:

I'm a daily user of Sketchup and Vray, mostly for architectural/environmental design work, but I've been interested in learning other programs that are more robust than Sketchup. I've dug into Rhino for a little bit but never got past the intro stages. Seemed really confusing but maybe after using it for a while it would seem second nature. 

 

Thanks for sharing!

same, never dug into it because i didnt have to but looks noteworthy. Im thinking its like a solidworks type of parametric...