915K views · Aug 9, 2016 · 9:32 · 3 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2017–2021
Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.
Why Hacker News points people here: Recommended as an approachable intro to path tracing in ray tracing and rendering threads.
“here's a great Disney video introducing path tracing”HN comment, 2018
“Disney made an excellent video describing their use of ray tracing in movies.”
Less technical, broader look at ray tracing in movies.
This is a really cool demonstration, love the code breakdowns. For a less technical, but broader scale description of ray tracing, Disney made an excellent video describing their use of ray tracing in movies. Check it out here: this video
“here's a great Disney video introducing path tracing”
Introduction to path tracing.
As the topic is about Ray Tracing in One Weekend and the book admits it's "technically a path tracer" here's a great Disney video introducing path tracing: this video
“Here's a kind of silly but accurate view of path tracing for animated features”
Silly but accurate view of path tracing for animation.
Here's a kind of silly but accurate view of path tracing for animated features this video Typically, most pathtracers use a technique called Monte Carlo Estimation, which means that they continuously loop over every pixel in an image, and average together the incoming light from randomly traced light paths. To calculate motion blur, they typically sample the scene at least twice (once at camera shutter open, and again at shutter close). Adaptive sampling rendering techniques will typically converge faster when there is less motion blur. One of the biggest time-saving techniques lately, is machine learning powered image denoising [1]. This allows the renderer to compute significantly fewer samples, but then have a 2D post-process run over the image and guess what the image might look like if it had been rendered with higher samples. Animated movies and VFX render each frame in terms of minutes and hours, while games need to render in milliseconds. Many of the techniques used in game rendering are approximations of physically based light transport, that look "good enough". But modern animated films and VFX are much closer to simulating reality with true bounced lighting and reflections. [1] link
