Soothing the Many-Headed Beast: Improving the Rendering Process in the World of 3D Animation

摘要

Today, one of the ubiquitous issues under discussion in 3D animation circles is the rendering process and the performance of rendering infrastructures. In the world of 3D animation, the rendering process translates the information in an animated scene to a sequence of images. Rendering is a complex, time consuming, and compute intensive task. Creating the most efficient rendering infrastructure and minimizing render times is important because small improvements for a single render node in a rendering infrastructure translate into major improvements in the overall performance of the infrastructure. As we work to improve and expand our current rendering infrastructure, we have closely studied the performance of different render node hardware and software. We discuss how we evaluated and found ways to improve the rendering process. In light of our experience at Ringling School, we will describe how we built a rendering infrastructure, including what features we found available and which ones mattered to us. Then we will give an empirical performance analysis of different hardware and software combinations for the render nodes. Lastly, we will wrap up with the lessons learned throughout the evaluation process and share the results we are experiencing.