Sort of related to animation but not entirely, I was wondering, how does CGI work in real films? Do you have to recreate each scene on the computer in order to embed your graphics in the scene? Or how do you get that realistic blend between real-life and computer generated images that we see in something like a Marvel movie?
dtorresr
Simulation can really help a ton with complex effects that are hard to manually animate, but I can imagine that the computational cost is also very high. In addition to rendering each frame, changes in the scene must be calculated. Do simulation calculations take as long as rendering the actual frames? (assuming path tracing or something similar is used)
keenan
@diegom Good question. The short answer is that there is no short answer: each movie, and even each shot might use different clever tricks/hacks to get a realistic integration of digital and live assets. VFX is a black art. This works out ok, because you can have an artist sit and work on a short segment of a movie for days, weeks, or months. Doesn't work so well in real-time, which is why augmented reality is such a challenging problem!
keenan
@dtorresr Totally depends on the type of simulation, and the type of rendering. But yes, in general, simulation can be very expensive (taking hours per frame, say). Big studios can reduce this cost somewhat by running simulations on massive systems---just as they render images across a large "render farm." So, as in the previous answer, figuring out how to make compelling simulation effects happen in real time is really a holy grail of graphics.
Sort of related to animation but not entirely, I was wondering, how does CGI work in real films? Do you have to recreate each scene on the computer in order to embed your graphics in the scene? Or how do you get that realistic blend between real-life and computer generated images that we see in something like a Marvel movie?
Simulation can really help a ton with complex effects that are hard to manually animate, but I can imagine that the computational cost is also very high. In addition to rendering each frame, changes in the scene must be calculated. Do simulation calculations take as long as rendering the actual frames? (assuming path tracing or something similar is used)
@diegom Good question. The short answer is that there is no short answer: each movie, and even each shot might use different clever tricks/hacks to get a realistic integration of digital and live assets. VFX is a black art. This works out ok, because you can have an artist sit and work on a short segment of a movie for days, weeks, or months. Doesn't work so well in real-time, which is why augmented reality is such a challenging problem!
@dtorresr Totally depends on the type of simulation, and the type of rendering. But yes, in general, simulation can be very expensive (taking hours per frame, say). Big studios can reduce this cost somewhat by running simulations on massive systems---just as they render images across a large "render farm." So, as in the previous answer, figuring out how to make compelling simulation effects happen in real time is really a holy grail of graphics.