[chrisseaton]

"If raytraced scenes were hard to control, why would every single animated movie be ray traced?"

I'm not entirely sure that's actually true.

In this paper (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/RayTracingCars/paper.pdf) Pixar talk about how the first movie they even tested using ray tracing on was Cars. Before that they were using scanline rendering.

[pjackson5]

I think you are missing a shift that has happened in the industry over the last few years. Yes, now that computers are fast enough, pixar raytraces everything in renderman. Most other major studios use that or arnold, a pure raytracer.

[berkut]

That's Pixar - they're behind the curve, and PRMan 17 and 18 (their commercial renderer they sell) has been pretty poor at full raytracing (monte-carlo integration) due to poor acceleration structures and the overhead of their RSL shading language.

PRMan 19 looks like it's going to fix these issues to some degree.

Other renderers like Arnold and VRay (full raytracers) have been being used for the last 5 years by other studios.

[pjmlp]

Funny to see Pixar getting behind. I remember when I was amazed what Renderman could do in NeXT stations.

[tinco]

You are absolutely right. People should stop upvoting my post because I'm totally wrong. Not only was Cars the first movie that was done using ray tracing, they thought it was glitchy and MU which was released 6 years later was actually the first movie to be fully raytraced.

That said, the technique they did use was scanline rendering, which is still rather different from z-buffering, which is the way GPU's generally render.

Of course now I'll change my argument that Pixar is after a non-realistic cartoony feel, so that gives them more freedom.

If you look at live action movies, the CG parts in there are either painted or ray traced, they need absolute control to be able to blend them.

[berkut]

That's Pixar - they've been late to the path tracing party by several years. Also MU didn't use raytracing for hair shadows - they still used deep shadow maps for that.

Other studios like ILM, SPI and Bluesky have been using full path tracing for years.