Disney's Hyperion renderer, anything special?

[robo]

Hey people,

any tech-savvy people who heard about Disney's in-house Hyperion renderer
and know more about it?
It mentions basically GI semi-non-biased to get the physical plausible results but supposedly much more
efficient due to their data architecture (things like bundling together rays coming from similar angles):

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2471740,00.asp

"Hyperion has been in development since 2011, but draws on multiple research projects on multi-bounce complex global illumination carried out at Disney's Zurich research lab. Animators can now create frames containing highly accurate simulations of 10 billion simultaneous rays of light as Hyperion calculates the illumination, bounce, shadows, and redirection of every single beam—something that would have been computationally impossible before Hyperion. It is able to do this efficiently even within massively complex scenes by using a novel streaming data architecture. "

Isn't this what common renderers like Vray already do or is there more to it
(and if so, could it help Corona, for settings in projects where you're pressed for faster render times)?

[Ondra]

The decision to sort rays is pretty huge, it affects a lot in the renderer. Corona does not use it. It makes a bunch of things possible (such as out of core, and GPU rendering), but complicates a lot of other stuff. Hyperion uses it, arnold does not AFAIK. I would love to do a sorting engine prototype, but there is not enough time for that :/

[robo]

Ah, appreciate the explanation.
It is helpful it seems but maybe interesting for another project or
somebody else who has time to develop a renderer. :)

[Juraj]

somebody else who has time to develop a renderer. :)

And whole Zurich ETH research department as well :- ) ?


I would love to see how these tools at least look, why can't they even show the UI for sakes...? Just endless stream of PR videos for laic public.

[burnin]

It is integrated into  IFX Clarisse 2.
Check forums, WIP threads, feel free to test PLE version...
An example:
"... Its a zbrush mesh of about 100 million polys and a huge amount of mari textures and lots of volumes from Houdini. Rendertimes is about 20 mins per frame...."

Source: http://forum.isotropix.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1277

[tomislavn]

...feel free to test PLE version...[/url]

- CNode and CRender don't run in PLE.

From their "About PLE" link :/ so I don't think the render is usable.

[Ondra]

I would love to see how these tools at least look, why can't they even show the UI for sakes...? Just endless stream of PR videos for laic public.

Because they probably do not have UI...

[Juraj]

Why wouldn't they.. ? It's not early version of PRMan, they constantly boast about making it as super artist-friendly as possible. I am not expecting to see some kind of layout of various settings that might indeed be behind console only,
but they definitely have a layout for shader.

[tomasd]

Why wouldn't they.. ? It's not early version of PRMan, they constantly boast about making it as super artist-friendly as possible. I am not expecting to see some kind of layout of various settings that might indeed be behind console only,
but they definitely have a layout for shader.

Why would they? The Hyperion team is really small and focuses on what they do best, the renderer. I'd assume that they do what just about every other big studio does, provide an API and try to keep the UI more or less the same, independent of the currently used renderer.
Without going into too much detail, our UI can (and often is) modified for each show, based on what the supervisors decide should be the reasonable knobs. (We are, more or less, PRMan compatible, so things are handled through Ri calls).

[Juraj]

ok but what does the interface the for example artist responsible for shading&material creation get to work with on latest Pixar show utilizing Hyperion ? The atributes are listed in the Disney papers but I would love to see what it translates to in end result. Not asking how the GUI looks but exactly the knobs you mention. Just curious. Otherwise I have no idea what "artist-friendly' means in the context.

[Ondra]

"artist-friendly" in this context IMHO means "we do not have to set up 300 bounce lights per shot", not "names of our paremeters make more sense than before"

[Ludvik Koutny]

It is integrated into  IFX Clarisse 2.

Clarisse IFX uses Clarisse renderer, not Hyperion. Clarisse renderer is certainly good at rendering complexity, but at the same time lacking in some other areas.

[Juraj]

I can see where the confusion arisen though:

We are extremely proud to release the first release of Clarisse iFX Hyperion. Hyperion is the codename of Clarisse 2.0

[Juraj]

OK finally found it... from page 52:

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-course/burley/s2015_pbs_disney_bsdf_slides.pdf

Superb paper.

[tomasd]

OK finally found it... from page 52:

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-course/burley/s2015_pbs_disney_bsdf_slides.pdf

Superb paper.

Ah, didn't get what you mean there then. The disney BRDF is fairly nice, although our guys who worked with it claim that it is not as artist friendly when you are modelling something real. It really needs a good support from layering system. (Dunno whether they have it or not)

And Hyperion is really popular name it seems, our shading system is called Hyperion. :-D