Really cool, thanks for sharing. Any idea how much data this can ingest before the rendering gets slow? I know horsepower on the client will vary, and the definition of slow is subjective, but just ballpark. Or is that an exercise for the reader?
For this render I used 10+ y/o laptop w/ CPU P4 Dual-Core + integrated GPU Radeon Xpress 1250 (Blender was running in `software-gl` mode) — as a result this model rendered in few hours ( ^_^;)
Given I can do token generation on a 30 watt laptop, the language/Joule part at least seems to be the computer winning. (Separate to any discussion about quality).
Not so for images, as I can imagine visual scenes in what feels like real time, while even the fastest image generator I've seen was 200-300 ms at 512x512.
This is true, but the are pre-rendered for a reason. Anything with water you're looking at 24hour+ sim time, plus render, and 1tb of data plus. SubSurface Scattering (translucency) takes a huge amount of CPU time.
The movie is using a whole compute cluster to do a physics simulation when rendering the movie. Your computer has 1 CPU and 1 GPU.
Your computer is just very limited in how much attention to detail it can have, because it has wildly less processing power and has to get its job done in real time.
By contrast, Disney is using a server farm to spend 3 seconds analyzing the mechanics of a tuft of hair wiggling in the breeze for 1 second.
3D rendering was unbelievably slow for a long time too, the good thing about computers is they have storage so you can render 1 frame an hour if you want and just record it and play it back later.
The performance could be a bit of both I imagine – a computer with a weak GPU or a visualisation at sufficiently large resolution will strain the framerate, especially the higher quality demos (eg. "All The Things").
The data sources are remote and so you may notice tiles and data taking a little while to load before popping into view. This is something I'm looking to improve with more sophisticated networking and Web Workers for background processing without locking up the browser.
Funny, while listening to my laptop's fan going crazy I was thinking that any computer from 2000 would have enough power to render this if it was native :P
Pre-render steps (building the BVH/KDTree, caching transformed geometry, caching textures and building mipmaps) can take 2 hours before the rendering even starts :)
And this is on a machine with 32 i7 cores and 96 GB of RAM.
There's a reason SPI and Weta (and the other CG/VFX companies, although those two have the biggest) have huge renderfarms...
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