Walt Disney Animation Studios has transitioned to path-traced global illumination as part of a progression of brute-force physically based rendering in the name of artist efficiency. To achieve this without compromising our geometric or shading complexity, we built our Hyperion renderer based on a novel architecture that extracts traversal and shading coherence from large, sorted ray batches. In this article, we describe our architecture and discuss our design decisions. We also explain how we are able to provide artistic control in a physically based renderer, and we demonstrate through case studies how we have benefited from having a proprietary renderer that can evolve with production needs.
We present an energy-conserving fiber shading model for hair and fur that is efficient enough for path tracing. Our model adopts a near-field formulation to avoid the expensive integral across the fiber, accounts for all high order internal reflection events with a single lobe, and proposes a novel, closed-form distribution for azimuthal roughness based on the logistic distribution. Additionally, we derive, through simulation, a parameterization that relates intuitive user controls such as multiple-scattering albedo and isotropic cylinder roughness to the underlying physical parameters.
The Digital Emily Project was a 2008 collaboration between facial animation company Image Metrics and the Graphics Laboratory at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies to achieve one of the world's first photorealistic digital facial performances. The project leveraged latest-generation techniques in high-resolution face scanning, character rigging, videobased facial animation, and compositing. By building an animatable face model whose expressions closely mirror the shapes observed in a rich set of facial scans, acquiring realistic skin reflectance maps, and faithfully driving the face by video of an actual performance, the project rendered a synthetic facial performance which was generally mistaken to be a real face.
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