In July, Massive Software announced graphics processing unit-accelerated rendering for its Massive 3D animation system. Available for use with products including NVIDIA Quadro graphics boards, the GPU-accelerated rendering support enables visual effects artists to render huge-scale Massive shots at film quality without a render farm.

Large facilities can maximize the new GPU-accelerated rendering to free up rendering resources and produce Massive simulations while maintaining quality and speed. Visual effects studios of any size can use Massive and render out large-scale Massive scenes — using their typical production setups. Complex crowd scenes and closer foreground scenarios can be rendered on the GPU.

“Massive is currently running on a variety of popular boards from NVIDIA and we feel GPU-accelerated rendering will be a terrific addition to our current capabilities in RenderMan, 3Delight, Air and, soon to be added, mental ray,” Regelous says.

“GPU-accelerated rendering is a technology whose time has come because it has the support of the manufacturers,” Regelous adds. “It’s a huge advantage with our new product, Massive Jet… This will help bring our software to those who would not otherwise have the resources to render Massive files.”

When it comes to rendering software, Pixar’s RenderMan has been at the forefront of technology for years. © Pixar Animation Studios.

Unified Assets
Another method under discussion to speed up render times — or, rather, to avoid reinventing the rendering wheel — is to share assets and models. “It’s a common question whether assets can be repurposed for games, for example,” Ford says. “It’s a different dynamic to render for a videogame, which needs to be in realtime, scaled to fit performance. While videogames obviously want to be high quality, they are not as high-quality as movies.” Ford notes that there’s always a “jump up” in video game quality when a new console is introduced, allowing for a richer image.

However, the opportunity still exists to share existing assets, especially when the same studio (or parent company) is responsible for creating both a movie and a corresponding videogame. “While the game assets would almost certainly end up being less complex than what ultimately might be found in a game, there are plenty of companies looking at how to make this a reality,” observes Gritz. “In addition to the potential cost savings, consider the financial benefits of being able to produce both movie and game in tandem such that when moviegoers attend the film they could walk out and immediately buy the game. Not to mention that this would certainly lead to the game characters looking a lot more like the characters in the film.”

“There are two key hot spots, in my opinion,” notes Regelous. “First is the complexity of the scene. How you handle the amount of data for a crowd scene, for example, is something we’ve been addressing in production with Massive for the past seven years. These days, it’s necessary to not just write out big chunks of data but to find better ways to represent the data.

“The second, and probably most important, hot spot is asset management. There is currently no commercially available asset management render queue program in terms of a solution that can deal with both in the same database. Pipeline, in development by Jim Callahan, promises to be a step towards better management for rendering.”

Managing assets across workflow is a hot spot for Gelato too. “NVIDIA demonstrated an example of this at SIGGRAPH, where an image was rendered using Gelato and then the same image data was passed to a workstation running IRIDAS software where the image was then color corrected,” Gritz says.

“There was no need to `export’ the image out of Gelato and then `import’ the image into the IRIDAS application,” Gritz explains. “By maintaining the `native’ file, you are able to maintain the highest levels of precision and quality throughout the entire workflow. This has huge implications as studios are able to integrate other production tools in a similar fashion.”

Data management is definitely important to getting things done in a timely manner. “There were 220 vfx shots in the Stealth film,” says Grant. In order to manage the data, the Stealth planes were rendered into 22 layers. “If you have 100 things in a scene, you need to manage the data in layers that the renderers can handle. You need to achieve a balance.”