I went to a women in animation panel at Berkeley a couple years ago where I got to talk to some technical directors at Pixar. One of the engineer's entire job was working on rendering hair. I wonder how much of Pixar's hair rendering relies on the algorithms we study in class (or just common ones in the graphics space) vs. in-house development. They do their own research and a lot of their tech is proprietary, (https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RendermanTog2018/paper.pdf), just makes me think about the industry and development of these types of algorithms
micahtyong
That's really cool you mention a whole job is dedicated to rendering hair! In some Pixar animations, like Ratatouille, there are certain scenes with over 500 million hair strands. Pixar actually released an overview paper on how they were able to build these scenes in a memory-efficient and performant (minimize rendering time) way using caching, optimized bounding boxes, and motion blur. Source: https://graphics.pixar.com/library/500MillionHairs/paper.pdf
shreyaskompalli
It's really interesting how some of the most normal and basic things in life take fascinating amounts of detail and computing power to render. The hair here is a great example; we think nothing of hair when we see it with our own two eyes in everyday life, but when we transition to the world of computer graphics it becomes an intensive and detailed process to replicate this look.
nobugnohair
I was impressed by the hair rendering in zootopia!! It is exciting to learn how they achieved this effect.
lucywan
It's so interesting that something that seems so ordinary is so complex to create and render. I never really thought about hair like this until this lecture. It really makes you realize how much rendering is like abstracting the real world.
I went to a women in animation panel at Berkeley a couple years ago where I got to talk to some technical directors at Pixar. One of the engineer's entire job was working on rendering hair. I wonder how much of Pixar's hair rendering relies on the algorithms we study in class (or just common ones in the graphics space) vs. in-house development. They do their own research and a lot of their tech is proprietary, (https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RendermanTog2018/paper.pdf), just makes me think about the industry and development of these types of algorithms
That's really cool you mention a whole job is dedicated to rendering hair! In some Pixar animations, like Ratatouille, there are certain scenes with over 500 million hair strands. Pixar actually released an overview paper on how they were able to build these scenes in a memory-efficient and performant (minimize rendering time) way using caching, optimized bounding boxes, and motion blur. Source: https://graphics.pixar.com/library/500MillionHairs/paper.pdf
It's really interesting how some of the most normal and basic things in life take fascinating amounts of detail and computing power to render. The hair here is a great example; we think nothing of hair when we see it with our own two eyes in everyday life, but when we transition to the world of computer graphics it becomes an intensive and detailed process to replicate this look.
I was impressed by the hair rendering in zootopia!! It is exciting to learn how they achieved this effect.
It's so interesting that something that seems so ordinary is so complex to create and render. I never really thought about hair like this until this lecture. It really makes you realize how much rendering is like abstracting the real world.