While RenderMan is the ‘gold standard’ by which other production renderers are judged, Arnold has certainly got the reputation as perhaps the fastest production renderer for many styles of projects – a point made to fxguide by not one but several of their competitors.īut beyond these two big players, there is an amazing number of production renderers and people are very passionate about which they prefer. And in each case we have been porting the shader set between the renderers.” For example, Arnold was used on Star Trek: Into Darkness, Pacific Rim and The Lone Ranger this year at ILM, along with other renderers. But I have to say on the last few films we have really been jumping around on renderers. “Arnold became the next big thing and we were looking at that on the last few shows. “All renderers have strengths and weaknesses and different departments here at ILM use different renderers,” adds Snow. On Pearl Harbor where we thought GI was the answer we worked hard to try and get it to work in Mental Ray and on Iron Man we looked at Mental Ray, to see if we could match the suits when shared with another vendor.” In the end they used RenderMan. So I have always been a little bit biased towards them. Right now, ILM alone uses a range of renders from Arnold to RenderMan to V-Ray to newer tools like Modo.Īs Snow described to fxguide, he had told the team at Pixar earlier that day, “I am old school ILM – and we were RenderMan people – almost RenderMan chauvinist actually. ILM is not alone in seeing rendering as something in need of constant evaluation and far from a simple solution. If I want to use RenderMan I should be able to.” Pacific Rim. If someone wants to use Arnold they should be able to. But, as Snow explains, “we have had a lot of discussion at the supervisor level that we want to be renderer agnostic. ILM has a full site license of RenderMan and for many years primarily used it as their renderer, especially on creature work. While that may not be a topic most directors focus on, it is these people and their respective leads on projects who must decide how they will achieve the incredible shots they bid, often with unparalleled realism on ever tighter budgets. Rendering often comes up in conversations. It is one of the great things about the company,” says supervisor Ben Snow. ILM has an incredible wealth of visual effects supervisors with an astonishing collection of both Oscars and technical landmark innovations. It is a private lunch where they get to discuss anything and everything. Introduction: which renderer?Įach Tuesday at ILM in the Presidio in San Francisco at the former military base on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge there is a lunch for all the ILM visual effects supervisors. Many of the issues in this special two part series will also be covered in more depth in the July term at. Part 2 includes a run down of 14 of the most popular renderers for VFX. This part deals with the rendering trends in the VFX industry today.
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