GPU Rendering - Your Graphics Card Is Not Just For Games Anymore

More & More Production Quality Renderers

From The Redshift3d.Com Gallery Page, All credits to originating artists.

In large part the animation and special effects that we see in movies has been done either using practical effects or rendered on CPU powered rendering engines. While until fairly recently the graphics card has been mostly used to render things like games and run the basic functions of your desktop display. With the speed and memory capabilities of graphics cards increasing more and more rendering engines are being developed for doing high quality and high speed rendering. There are some outstanding examples of this as can be seen in demos that have been produced by some of the game development systems like Unity or Unreal Engine.

This is a demonstration that was produced by the folks at Unity and according to them is rendered in real time. This level of quality in a game platform is becoming less of an acception and more of the rule. Not to be outdone the Unreal Engine Folks have also produced some stunning examples of real time rendered video.

These are not the only GPU rendering platforms to do some amazing things. Take for example a system that runs within Adobe After Effects. Element 3D is a plugin that renders things perhaps not in real time but very quickly and has some pretty amazing results as seen below.

http://video9.videocopilot.net/videos/jetstrike/jetstrike_video_tour_1280x720.mp4

This is a demonstration of video that was rendered in their system using their jet pack that offers some truly amazing and very convincing results. Due to advances in systems like this more and more TV and movie production is being done on these platforms.

A Shift In Focus

For the last several years I have had to use a variety of systems to render things for my clients and this was largely true because there were somethings that were just not practical to expect out of earlier GPU rendering packages. As a mainstay I used Corona Renderer when I needed photographic quality still frame renders but due to the time it can take to render out a single frame forces me often to use renders that still look good but produced less quality.

This is an example of a scene that was done in Corona Render. It is a concept piece that I am doing for a client. This single frame took nearly 3.5 hours to render a 1920 x 1080 image. Now imagine that this scene had to be animated. Generally film is rendered out at about 24 frames per second. So one second of animated output would take days to be rendered on a single machine. In the case where you have to do this type of production the usual technique is to use a large number of computers to render out individual frames and then assemble them back together once the whole sequence is done. This still can take an exceptional amount of time and is not cheap. So lower budget production and visualization work is rarely done this way.

This is pretty much the same scene that was rendered in Redshift renderer in something like 3.5 minutes. Given that I am completely new to their material systems I would say that I got a pretty good result in a short amount of time. The quality of a system like this is now something that I can offer my lower budget customers and I don't have to spend large amounts of times waiting for renders. In fact it is so fast that I can often experiment more with the finished look and not have to worry about days or weeks being lost to rendering.

This is the first test animation that I did on the system. It is pretty much a straight out of the box trial run at using the system. It rendered the whole 10 seconds of animation in under 30 minutes. This is a huge step forward for me in productivity.

It took me about 10 hours to render this video. With previous renders it would have taken days or maybe weeks. So for me there is an incredible jump in productivity. I can now offer my customers a higher level of output with lower cost. Previously a lot of the work that I have done was rendering in Lumion 3D. Because it would take hours not days to get output.

While this animation looks pretty good I personally do not think it looks as good as Corona Or Redshift. What do you think? has the age of the GPU render come to production animation and special effects. If you are a 3d artist what engines do you like and why?