points by diskzero 4 days ago | 0 comments
Dreamworks used Renderman(Pixar’s Renderman) along with several other commercial package for a Shark Tale. When Dreamworks acquired PDI, who made Shrek under contract for DWA, there was essentially a war between the two pipelines and PDI won. I was on the PDI side of the company, but there was a lot of positive things about the Renderman pipeline.
[–] dahart 4 days ago
[–] diskzero 4 days ago
We all had to imagine making our next show using each others pipeline and that was fun. In the end, I think Richard, Jono and other PDI folks ended up having a bit more influence because Shrek was so darn successful.
Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.
[–] dahart 4 days ago
Oh definitely - custom vs commercial. I remember the R&D team having to write a yearly report to justify the development expenditure, explain repeatedly why we were writing custom tools & renderer when these things were available off the shelf. I heard a few strong rants here and there about how the suits just didn’t understand. I remember the term “NextGen” being thrown around but I don’t remember if I lived through it or it was just getting started when I left (before S3). Jono I and tried for a while to stop having our shaders rewritten in C++ (without otherwise changing them nor adding any features). We eventually gave up and just kept building new things, but that was a fairly successful strategy to nudge the IP, tech, and support southward. Possibly the right strategy in retrospect, but felt a little rough at the time.
[–] diskzero 3 days ago
Were the shaders written in “script”? :) We had to deep dive into that runtime a reverse engineer and fix it during the fun you must have missed during the 32 to 64 bit transition we did right around Bee Movie timeline.
[–] dahart 3 days ago
Nope, they were just written in C. It was object oriented C, but without a C++ compiler. Do you know the story about the whole C++ toolset that was rolled out by R&D and promptly rejected by production? That happened before my time, but according to legend is what lead to PDI’s strict avoidance of C++… until a couple of years into the DWA merger. (Clearly there were some problems beyond C vs C++, but I don’t know the whole story.) Anyway, yeah I remember starting on the 64b transition, but left before that was finished.
[–] kirugan 4 days ago
I wonder why PDI was better than Renderman ?
[–] dahart 4 days ago
“Better” is a loaded word. When you write your own renderer, you have a lot more control and a lot more support. Renderers at the time had not all converged on the same algorithms, so you could have a competitive advantage by writing a good one. PDI’s shader system was different than RenderMan’s and had some real advantages — compiled shaders, geometry & light shaders (not just materials), particles & particle shadowing, compositor integration, etc.. The renderer also needs to integrate into the pipeline deeply, so PDI’s renderer fits the PDI/DW pipeline better, whereas with RenderMan you have to try to mold the pipeline to fit the renderer in.
[–] diskzero 4 days ago
It wasn’t the renderer as much as the pipeline. The renderer is just one process in a stunning amount of complexity that must be managed. We may even agree that Renderman was better than the PDI renderer but there was so much much more.
PDI’s toolset was pure magic for it’s time. When I joined, I was in heaven with how easy it was to make procedural animation, build new effects that crossed pipeline stages, render anything you could imagine… I wished I could share it with researchers and hobbyists.