Render Legion and Corona Join Forces with Chaos Group

[spadestick]

Google says "At its root, Cars 3 is a story about getting old and figuring out how to accept that you can’t stay on top forever."

That is definitely one side of it, but even more importantly it is about realization and mentoring/nurturing of the next generation into greatness.

There's also some interesting rendering technology behind it. But I might be reading too much into it, maybe Vlado just really likes the story :)

The Cars3 Story is here :
Emeryville, CA – (August 2nd 2017)  Pixar Animation Studios today gave a special preview of upcoming technologies at the 2017 RenderMan Art & Science Fair, including new interactive capabilities for RenderMan 22 and work on “XPU” rendering using CPU+GPU cores together. Demonstrations of RenderMan 21.5 showcased break-through technologies for rendering CGI characters, including state-of-the-art skin and hair developed for Pixar production. Presentations from Pixar and ILM revealed how feature films such as Cars 3, Coco, and Rogue One drive enhancements to RenderMan's core technology.

RenderMan 21.5, released July 26th, contains significant new features like “Path Traced Subsurface Scattering”, the most advanced technique for skin and soft materials available for production VFX. New artistic controls add to RenderMan’s industry-leading hair and fur, providing a wide range of new effects. This latest version delivers raw rendering performance gains on scenes with thousands of light sources, or complex combinations of mesh lights, hair and fur, volumetrics, and arbitrary outputs. The updated Denoiser enables new compositing workflows and is substantially faster due to advanced code optimizations. RenderMan 21.5 delivers UI simplification and workflow improvements for secondary passes, holdouts, material presets, and deep compositing.

“Artists here at MPC were able to use RenderMan to push the boundaries of complexity and realism in films like The Jungle Book,” said Damien Fagnou, CTO at MPC Film. “These new 21.5 features are helping us crash through those boundaries again on the next generation of projects.”

Pixar demonstrated several next-generation technologies at the event including a preview of next year’s RenderMan 22. It features “always-on” rendering embedded in artist applications, responding instantly to geometry, camera, light and material edits. This new live rendering mode delivers incredible interactive frame rates with the same renderer used for batch renders. Other RenderMan 22 technologies like fast vectorized OSL shader network evaluation on Intel scalable-SIMD CPUs were also shown.

Finally, Pixar unveiled RenderMan XPU, a combined CPU + GPU solution now under development. The XPU technology renders on both CPUs and GPUs concurrently, taking full advantage of workstation resources. RenderMan XPU was shown live on a production scene, demonstrating the power and artistic possibilities of this upcoming technology. More information on RenderMan XPU will become available closer to delivery, scheduled after RenderMan 22.

[twoheads]

My two cents after a huge jaw drop.

I'll just  save this thread for future generations and we will see in few years who is  right and who is wrong. Some people will say sorry, some will say "I told you", anyway I truly hope this is not the beginning of  the end. 


 PS:  I don't think we should call disappointment hate.

[3dwannab]

https://labs.chaosgroup.com/index.php/rendering-rd/cg-garage-podcast-137-ondrej-and-vlado-corona-and-v-ray/


Here's some more behind the scenes info, which I hope should probably clear some more doubts ;)

Just listening now. It does ease my concerns. I was angry for some reason at the start because I badly wanted Corona to do it on their own and win all sort of awards like VRay do now like the oscars for example which would've eventually happened (no doubt). Because it's just an awesome piece of software.


But this will make everything happen quicker esp in the VFX area. So I don't see the problem anymore as long as Corona stays around forever and ever and ever. :P


Best of luck all.
Viva Corona

[markfouronefour]

From when First used Vray I loved it, a breath of fresh air (over 13 years ago), Corona is now a new breath of fresh air, what Vlado has made for the world of 3D is incredible, what Ondra has created for Architure is a game changer, I personally think they both are amazing for different rolls, why can't they function together? If I made films VRay is so much more complex to deal with that Corona in so much more Architecture driven, have said that it holds its own in an animation world.

These are not money driven people they love what they do and are helping all of us, so let's all calm down and see where we are in the future....... the future is bright!!!!!

God bless VRay and Corona

PS I never rant but 15+ pages has made me give an opinion.

[davemahi]

I left Vray for Corona for animation in Film and TV. Everyone at our studio really prefers Corona for our work, even though it is branded an "Architectural" Render. I think that is slowly changing though. Corona for Film and TV!!!!!!

[lupaz]

I'm sick of mergers and acquisitions. It does nothing but disrupt innovation.
This sucks. It's really sad news.
Corona team you better not go into your comfort zone! (please)
Edit: Actually I'm shocked and disappointed at Chaos Group for not being able to come up with something on their own.

[vlado]

No, it won't be gone. It'll just get jammed into V-ray (which will get another 7 tabs with 84 roll-outs) and be sold as part of it - "(un)biased mode". All with appropriate "teams have decided that this is the best move, all that you love is now under one roof, better then ever, working together to bring the best rendering engine to you, the artist" sales pitch.

I don't think this will work; I've seen it fail too many times to even consider it as a possible approach. Some bits and pieces of technology can be shared between different products, but meshing them together in such a way as you describe is a recipe for disaster.

Best regards,
Vlado

[blank...]

Best regards,
Vlado

If anything, I have to give you credit for being far more patient then I expected :)

[vlado]

And as the time went by archviz in Vray’s development started to be substituted by vfx which simply means big money.

I don't know how you figured out that VFX means big money. The VFX market is really small and the business is difficult, but at the same time there are very high demands for the software and the customers sometimes want crazy things from it. Why do you think Autodesk now owns Arnold?

I think you’ve forgotten thanks to whom you’ve expanded. Progress is needed and it demands lot’s of money but one should always remember where the beginnings were and thank’s to whom (in my opinion) you came into being.

I remember very well where I've started from, and I'm very grateful to everyone who was and is a part of our journey. [As a side note, I also remember how disappointed I was to see people that have used our software to make a living, and many of which I personally helped through a tough project, then turn around and spit sh*t about it. It's fine and I try not to take it personally.]

The question is what will you do if people will be so fed up that they don’t want to even hear about you anymore … will you force them somehow to use Vray or give the choice?

I don't plan to force anyone to use V-Ray.

Recently we’ve seen kind of a revelation — Grant Warwick. There was finally a fresh breeze in the air and he changed the approach to Vray by 180 degrees. Finally, someone has explained in a simple manner, neatly and clearly how the sampler works and where have you been at that time? I bought the course despite I could say I know Vray but I bought it because Vray used to surprise me always and rarely it was a positive experience.

I'm glad you found Grant Warwick's tutorials useful. However many of these more advanced learning resources often served to confuse people and got them worse results than if they had just let the render engine do its job (I've seen it happen many many times in practice). When we introduced the automatic sampling in V-Ray, we didn't change anything in the engine, we just took the control away from the users and let the sampling algorithms (which have been there since the beginning) to do their job. It's a very good lesson for me and luckily the Corona team learned from it and avoided the issue right from the start.

So don’t be suprised that today so many people is pissed off that Vray is taking over Corona because they associate your company with complicated, hard to use and expensive engine that from some time haven’t done ANYTHING important for archviz business. Your policy is also unpredictible. Have you seen any valuable tuts for Vray in last 3-4 months? No and it’s because people left the engine in favour of Corona. There is no point in using complicated soft and wasting time while you can do things immidiately in Corona (just my opinion).

<shrug> As you said, it's your opinion. It's not the time or place to argue even if I don't agree with it. If you like Corona, that's great. As I'm not involved in its development, there's no reason to fear that we would somehow want to turn it into V-Ray or make it complicated. Why would we want to break something that already works very well?

Now the latest Vray 3.6 version … almost copy and paste features from Corona (despite I perceive a lightmixer as a redundant tool in a current form and RAM expensive in Corona).

Um, Cryptomatte support? Hybrid rendering? Anyways, again not the time or place to argue.

The power increase in rendering is of course noticable in Vray but it’s questionalble that a new person will be able to use that power at all. At leats I don’t think so …

Suprisingly they do. But again, not the right place for this discussion. You are welcome to continue on the V-Ray forum :)

Someone has mentioned that there will be more programmers in a Corona team? Twelve? So how come you say the prices of Corona won’t go up?

Let us worry about that. It's not a problem that you have to solve.

I’m more concerned about the fact that you will start implementing your way of thinking in Corona development - overcoplicated way of thinking that is deaf on the regular and sometimes beginning users.

There's no need to be concerned. As I mentioned, I will not be involved in Corona's development in any way.

What is the pesimistic version? In 2 years Corona will be gone (or will not exist and be developed the way it is developed today). I don’t mention the price policy. It might be hot topic but most of the people here are serious professionals that are aware of the fact that good product must cost.

I'm fairly certain that this pessimistic version will not happen.

By the way if so big studios like Platige Image get rid of Vray in favour of Arnold and others do follow like Juice you should start thinking. It’s not just the case of the operating systems.

I have never claimed that V-Ray is the best renderer of all renderers. There are reasons why Arnold, RenderMan, 3delight, Corona and so on exist. It is just not possible for one single renderer to cover all possible use cases, and do so with maximum efficiency.

Thanks Vlado once more that despite so many tough comments (including mines) you’re here and read and reply. You’re active like back when the Vray was 1.09.3 42 45 and so on.

I have never been away and tough comments don't frighten me :) Don't worry, I don't plan to meddle on this forum beyond this thread :)

Best regards,
Vlado

[lupaz]

No, it won't be gone. It'll just get jammed into V-ray (which will get another 7 tabs with 84 roll-outs) and be sold as part of it - "(un)biased mode". All with appropriate "teams have decided that this is the best move, all that you love is now under one roof, better then ever, working together to bring the best rendering engine to you, the artist" sales pitch.

I don't think this will work; I've seen it fail too many times to even consider it as a possible approach. Some bits and pieces of technology can be shared between different products, but meshing them together in such a way as you describe is a recipe for disaster.

Best regards,
Vlado

It'd be interesting to know why ChaosG. didn't basically do a Corona, separate from Vray, to compete.
I know many got tired of asking for something like that years ago in your forum, even before Corona came out. Was it too expensive? Don't get it.

[vlado]

It'd be interesting to know why ChaosG. didn't basically do a Corona, separate from Vray, to compete. I know many got tired of asking for something like that years ago in your forum, even before Corona came out. Was it too expensive? Don't get it.

We considered it, of course. Ultimately we decided that we didn't want to split our efforts and its best to concentrate on what we already have. Besides, and this is actually the more important reason, my mind is wired in a certain way and I'm not sure that if we started something new, it wouldn't turn out the same way. Corona's team has a fresh perspective on the rendering problems and I can't really match that. Which, again, is why I would much rather work with them than against them.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vkiuru]

A lot of people really need to grow up. It's software, it's business not a sport team to follow!

ChaosGroup are good, Corona will be in good hands.

Quoted for truth :) some people go way overboard over this. Look around you, take a deep breath & maybe even take a walk, realise you're in a pretty good place in life if worst-case-scenario patterns over a rendering engine are a thing you stress over. Yes it's your renderer of choice but come on :P

Extremely curious if this would eventually mean an easy, straightforward access & workflow w/ Phoenix FD. I haven't gone through all the chit chat, maybe it's been covered already.

I used Vray daily, first as a hobbyist from 2003 (I think) to 2005 and then professionally every single day from early 2006 to summer of 2013 when Corona sank its hooks in me; haven't used Vray after that but still have my dongle. When the Vray licensing went through changes I heard the term "dongle" the first time I ever btw, and it was pretty funny :P

Ehh.. anyway, love the engine and Chaosgroup customer support - just needed fresh winds so as to not exhaust myself, and a promising new renderer is always a fun ride because the leaps in development are huge and interesting during the first years :)

I hope many great things to come out of this marriage. Congratulations Ondra, Vlado & co! :)

[vlado]

Extremely curious if this would eventually mean an easy, straightforward access & workflow w/ Phoenix FD.

That's the plan, yes.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ondra]

I'm sick of mergers and acquisitions. It does nothing but disrupt innovation.
This sucks. It's really sad news.
Corona team you better not go into your comfort zone! (please)
Edit: Actually I'm shocked and disappointed at Chaos Group for not being able to come up with something on their own.

We actually had to go waaaay out of our comfort zone for this ;)

[vkiuru]

I remember very well where I've started from, and I'm very grateful to everyone who was and is a part of our journey. [As a side note, I also remember how disappointed I was to see people that have used our software to make a living, and many of which I personally helped through a tough project, then turn around and spit sh*t about it. It's fine and I try not to take it personally.]

I paid a one time fee for my years with Vray (ok, I paid for Vray RT too, an investment which turned out a bit funny some time after the fact - but in grand scheme of things it wasn't a big deal and it was really cool tech to get to play with so early on). Got free support, updates and upgrades for a long time. What Vray cost me is nothing compared to what I got out of it. A great render engine and I think a lot of people can relate to that position of taking time to help someone only to later find the person/party to prove to be something not quite worth the time you spent with them. I learned my lesson pretty early but still, repeated enough times and there's a chance you turn bitter. I don't envy your position, as you kind of have to be open to offer help to certain extent.

Wish you the best of luck. Hopefully both parties find new energy and perspective from this and come up with some cool innovations!

EDIT: "That's the plan, yes.

Best regards,
Vlado"

Ok well there we go :D Nice!