Ruijia's VFX Blog

As we all know, rendering is a very essential step in film and animation productions. This report provides a two-fold perspective on the achievements and challenges of real-time rendering by reviewing the history and the technical background of the process as well as demonstrating the interactivity and wider possibilities of the previsualization of film the Lion King shoot and unity’s real-time rendering work Enemies, thus exploring how real-time rendering is influencing the film industry. 

I chose this as the topic of my report because I found the direction interesting and the scope of its application very broad and challenging. 

Before preparing this paper, my understanding of real-time rendering was only on some software applications, such as blender’s real-time rendering, but as my research progressed, I discovered that it is a very large and deep area that relies on the wisdom of previous generations to explore step by step. For example, the concept of ray tracing is not a recent one, as it has been explored as a research topic since the 1980s, but due to the lack of hardware computing power at the time, ray tracing progressed slowly until 2018, which is also considered to be the first year of ray tracing, This was the year that Star Wars short films with cinematic visual effects based on real-time ray tracing came to the spotlight.  

Research :

The literature on this topic has been a great help in understanding and discovering the subject, Real Time Rendering, a book providing a detailed overview of the development, the categories as well as stages of rendering. I chose this book as a foundation because it is a must-read for real-time rendering, with challenging and enjoyable units on mathematical theories, graphics rendering pipelines, lighting, collision detection and more. 

Contents :

I have divided the content into three main sections, the definition of real-time rendering, the hardware development background, and Application of real-time rendering in film. What ‘s more, I have selected two directions that I find typical with regards to the application, the first of which is real-time rendering as pre-visualization, which belongs to the pre-production stage of animation. the second one is latest Film productions based on real-time rendering such as Enemies. 

The conclusion I come to is that real-time rendering redefines what is being worked on. Its real-time and interactive nature allows directors to preview the final film effect directly. Which also reduces time and production costs and increases the efficiency of collaboration across departments. This has the potential to re-divide the content of different positions. But to render out relying on high precision operations still requires offline rendering.