NVIDIA Out To Prove the Power of GPU-Enhanced Rendering
For the past few years NVIDIA has been trying to make inroads into the rendering market with the development of its software renderer Gelato. In order to refine the software to fit in with the workflow of studios, big and small, and as proof that Gelato is a film-quality renderer, NVIDIA brought on animator Timothy Heath to create a short animated film, The Plush Life, which debuted at Siggraph.
STUDIODAILY: Why did NVIDIA decide to create an in-house animated short?
DOMINICK SPINA: We undertook this project because for the last few years we’ve been trying to get studios to use Gelato exclusively. Most studios use a variety of software and we wanted to get some interesting results and some benchmarking from a film resolution animated short done completely in Gelato.
Why is NVIDIA, maker of graphics cards and other hardware solutions, getting into the software rendering game?
DS: We primarily develop hardware graphics cards and Gelato is a film rendering software that runs on the GPU. It’s a CPU and GPU rendering tool. Because of the advancements in GPU technology, which is getting much faster than things being done on CPU we’re pushing this technology.
It is similar to other rendering products on the market the only difference is that you are going to have to have an NVIDIA GPU card in your machine. It runs on all our cards but we certify it for the professional cards, the QuadroFX cards.
How does Gelato compare to other rendering apps on the market and how has the reception been of Gelato so far?
DS: The hurdle to get over with Gelato is that graphics cards need to be in every machine because you are going to want to distribute rendering to all of your machines. The battle we’ve been having is that studios have not outfitted their render farms with graphics cards. But that is starting to happen. The reason that is happening, and what we’re trying to prove with Gelato, is that that the investment in the cards for the renderfarms would be a great advantage because of the speed and quality that you’ll get from our render software. We can show so pretty remarkable speed comparisons from just CPU renderers.
We’ll have pretty much all of the feature sets that are in Mental Ray or Renderman, but where we are going to beat them is the speed and freeing up the CPU power for the other processes that you are doing.
What have your test shown in terms of speed of rendering with Gelato?
In the past we’ve been able to show that Gelato is three to five times as fast as competitors. Right now we have Gelato 2.2 released which does not take advantage of a lot of the new architecture being release by NVIDIA right now, particularly the G80 architecture. Because of the G80 architecture we’ve been able to make so significant improvements in speed. In the past we’ve been able to show that Gelato is three to five times as fast as competitors.
We released 2.2 at Siggraph and we showed a technology demonstration which will be Gelato 3 which will probably be released in the spring. Right now we’re also talking with studios to refine Gelato so it suits their workflows.
TIMOTHY HEATH: Last summer I came on board on NVIDIA as their resident Gelato artist to do demos and create short films. The Plush Life is the first of its kind. We started with a small piece based on two guys commuting to work together. This is an introduction to the characters. They are made out of plush materials. It’s all built in CG in Maya. We used Joe Alter’s Shave & a HairCut for the hair and renderer with Gelato.
How did Gelato perform with Maya?
TH: It’s a seamless workflow with Maya; Gelato is well integrated into the Maya user interface, just as Mental Ray or Renderman is. So there’s not a whole lot new that I had to learn. It’s just a matter of flipping the right switches. So this project helped us figure out some things, debug the software. Trying to find the best results the fastest.
The quality is on par or better than the other renderers out there. It is a film-quality renderer. The speed for some things is a lot faster, especially for rendering motion blur and depth of field and things like that. I didn’t have to worry about displacement issues. Sometimes with some renderers you get cracking and other problems. I didn’t have to worry about that with Gelato at all.
What’s really cool is how fast things are getting, particularly with ambient occlusions and seeing what you are going to get faster so you can make a lot more decisions in the time that you have as opposed to rendering it three times in a day at different levels of fidelity to see what it looks like and hoping for the best,. Now it is almost instantaneous for things like ambient occlusions.
What are the things that will be worked on for the release of Gelato 3?
DS:Where Tim’s expertise is going to help us is fine tuning the workflows and how Gelato interfaces with the other third party software packages. We can get Gelato to do relighting passes very quickly but if the interface within Maya or 3DS Max isn’t optimize than the artist is going to see little improvement. The challenge for all of the render developers is to optimize these abilities. For version 2.2 we’ve optimized the plug-in Mango for Maya and we will continue to work on improving the integration with software packages. Right now we have plug-ins for Maya, 3DS Max and Softimage XSI.
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