research-article

Sony Pictures Imageworks Arnold

Authors:

Christopher Kulla,

Alejandro Conty,

Clifford Stein,

Larry GritzAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 37, Issue 3

Article No.: 29, Pages 1 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/3180495

Published: 01 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Sony Imageworks’ implementation of the Arnold renderer is a fork of the commercial product of the same name, which has evolved independently since around 2009. This article focuses on the design choices that are unique to this version and have tailored the renderer to the specific requirements of film rendering at our studio. We detail our approach to subdivision surface tessellation, hair rendering, sampling, and variance reduction techniques, as well as a description of our open source texturing and shading language components. We also discuss some ideas we once implemented but have since discarded to highlight the evolution of the software over the years.

References

[1]

Abdalla G. M. Ahmed, Till Niese, Hui Huang, and Oliver Deussen. 2017. An adaptive point sampler on a regular lattice. ACM Trans. Graph. 36, 4, Article 138 (July 2017), 13 pages.

Digital Library

[2]

Dietger Van Antwerpen. 2011. Recursive MIS computation for streaming BDPT on the GPU. Technical report, Delft University of Technology.

[3]

Carsten Benthin, Sven Woop, Ingo Wald, and Attila T. Áfra. 2017. Improved two-level BVHs using partial re-braiding. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG ’17). ACM, New York, NY, Article 7, 8 pages.

Digital Library

[4]

Norbert Bus and Tamy Boubekeur. 2017. Double hierarchies for directional importance sampling in Monte Carlo rendering. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 6, 3, 25--37.

[5]

E. Catmull and J. Clark. 1978. Recursively generated B-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes. Computer-Aided Design 10, 6 (November 1978), 350--355.

[6]

Alejandro Conty and Christopher Kulla. 2017. Importance sampling of many lights with adaptive tree splitting. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks (SIGGRAPH ’17). ACM, New York, NY, Article 33, 2 pages.

[7]

Robert L. Cook. 1984. Shade trees. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 18, 3 (Jan. 1984), 223--231.

Digital Library

[8]

Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, and Edwin Catmull. 1987. The Reyes image rendering architecture. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 21, 4 (Aug. 1987), 95--102.

Digital Library

[9]

M. Ernst, M. Stamminger, and G. Greiner. 2006. Filter importance sampling. In 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. 125--132.

[10]

Julian Fong, Magnus Wrenninge, Christopher Kulla, and Ralf Habel. 2017. Production volume rendering: SIGGRAPH 2017 course. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses (SIGGRAPH’17). ACM, New York, NY, Article 2, 79 pages.

Digital Library

[11]

Iliyan Georgiev, Thiago Ize, Mike Farnsworth, Ramon Montoya-Vozmediano, Alan King, Brecht Van Lommel, Angel Jimenez, Oscar Anson, Shinji Ogaki, Eric Johnston, Adrien Herubel, Declan Russell, Frederic Servant, and Marcos Fajardo. 2018. Arnold: A brute-force production path tracer. ACM Transaction on Graphics (2018).

Digital Library

[12]

Iliyan Georgiev, Jaroslav Křivánek, Tomáš Davidovič, and Philipp Slusallek. 2012. Light transport simulation with vertex connection and merging. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, Article 192 (Nov. 2012), 10 pages.

Digital Library

[13]

David Goldberg. 1991. What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic. ACM Comput. Surv. 23, 1 (March 1991), 5--48.

Digital Library

[14]

Larry Gritz. 2008. OpenImageIO. Retrieved from https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio

[15]

Larry Gritz and James K. Hahn. 1996. BMRT: A global illumination implementation of the renderman standard. Journal of Graphics Tools 1, 3 (1996), 29--47.

Digital Library

[16]

Larry Gritz, Clifford Stein, Chris Kulla, and Alejandro Conty. 2010. Open shading language. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Talks (SIGGRAPH’10). ACM, New York, NY, Article 33, 1 pages. https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage.

Digital Library

[17]

Toshiya Hachisuka, Anton S. Kaplanyan, and Carsten Dachsbacher. 2014. Multiplexed metropolis light transport. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 4, Article 100 (July 2014), 10 pages.

Digital Library

[18]

Pat Hanrahan and Jim Lawson. 1990. A language for shading and lighting calculations. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 24, 4 (Sept. 1990), 289--298.

Digital Library

[19]

Paul S. Heckbert. 1990. Adaptive radiosity textures for bidirectional ray tracing. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH’90). ACM, New York, NY, 145--154.

Digital Library

[20]

Stephen Hill, Stephen McAuley, Alejandro Conty, Michal Drobot, Eric Heitz, Christophe Hery, Christopher Kulla, Jon Lanz, Junyi Ling, Nathan Walster, Feng Xie, Adam Micciulla, and Ryusuke Villemin. 2017. Physically based shading in theory and practice. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses (SIGGRAPH’17). ACM, New York, NY, Article 7, 8 pages.

Digital Library

[21]

Jared Hoberock and John C. Hart. 2010. Arbitrary importance functions for metropolis light transport.Comput. Graph. Forum 29, 6 (2010), 1993--2003.

[22]

Henrik Wann Jensen, James Arvo, Marcos Fajardo, Pat Hanrahan, Don Mitchell, Matt Pharr, and Peter Shirley. 2001. State of the art in Monte Carlo ray tracing for realistic image synthesis. Siggraph Courses (2001). https://www.siggraph.org//s2001/conference/courses/crs29.html.

[23]

Anton S. Kaplanyan and Carsten Dachsbacher. 2013. Path space regularization for holistic and robust light transport. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of Eurographics 2013) 32, 2 (2013), 63--72.

[24]

Timothy L. Kay and James T. Kajiya. 1986. Ray tracing complex scenes. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH’86). ACM, New York, NY, 269--278.

Digital Library

[25]

C. Kelemen, L. Szirmay-Kalos, G. Antal, and F. Csonka. 2002. A simple and robust mutation strategy for the metropolis light transport algorithm. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 21. 531--540.

[26]

Doyub Kim and Hyeong-Seok Ko. 2007. Eulerian motion blur. In Proceedings of the Third Eurographics Conference on Natural Phenomena (NPH’07). Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, 39--46.

Digital Library

[27]

Alan King, Christopher Kulla, Alejandro Conty, and Marcos Fajardo. 2013. BSSRDF importance sampling. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 Talks (SIGGRAPH’13). ACM, New York, NY, Article 48, 1 page.

Digital Library

[28]

Christopher Kulla and Marcos Fajardo. 2012. Importance sampling techniques for path tracing in participating media. Comput. Graph. Forum 31, 4 (June 2012), 1519--1528.

Digital Library

[29]

Peter Kutz, Ralf Habel, Yining Karl Li, and Jan Novák. 2017. Spectral and decomposition tracking for rendering heterogeneous volumes. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2017) 36, 4, Article 111 (July 2017).

Digital Library

[30]

Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve. 2004. LLVM: A compilation framework for lifelong program analysis 8 transformation. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization: Feedback-directed and Runtime Optimization (CGO’04). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=977395.977673http://llvm.org.

Digital Library

[31]

Charles Loop, Scott Schaefer, Tianyun Ni, and Ignacio Castaño. 2009. Approximating subdivision surfaces with gregory patches for hardware tessellation. In ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Papers (SIGGRAPH Asia’09). ACM, New York, NY, Article 151, 9 pages.

Digital Library

[32]

Henry Moreton. 2001. Watertight tessellation using forward differencing. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics Hardware (HWWS’01). ACM, New York, NY, 25--32.

Digital Library

[33]

R. Keith Morley, Solomon Boulos, Jared Johnson, David Edwards, Peter Shirley, Michael Ashikhmin, and Simon Premože. 2006. Image synthesis using adjoint photons. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2006 (GI’06). Canadian Information Processing Society, Toronto, Ont., Canada, Canada, 179--186. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1143079.1143109

Digital Library

[34]

Thomas Müller, Markus Gross, and Jan Novák. 2017. Practical path guiding for efficient light-transport simulation. Computer Graphics Forum 36, 4 (June 2017), 91--100.

Digital Library

[35]

Koji Nakamaru and Yoshio Ohno. 2002. Ray tracing for curves primitive. In WSCG.

[36]

K. Perlin and E. M. Hoffert. 1989. Hypertexture. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH’89). ACM, New York, NY, 253--262.

Digital Library

[37]

Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys. 2016. Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation (3rd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA.

Digital Library

[38]

Dan Piponi. 2004. Automatic differentiation, C++ templates, and photogrammetry. Journal of Graphics Tools 9, 4 (2004), 41--55.

[39]

Holly E. Rushmeier and Gregory J. Ward. 1994. Energy preserving non-linear filters. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH’94). ACM, New York, NY, 131--138.

Digital Library

[40]

Charles M. Schmidt and Brian Budge. 2002. Simple nested dielectrics in ray traced images. Journal of Graphics Tools 7, 2 (2002), 1--8. arXiv:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10867651.2002.10487555

[41]

Pradeep Sen, Matthias Zwicker, Fabrice Rousselle, Sung-Eui Yoon, and Nima Khademi Kalantari. 2015. Denoising your Monte Carlo renders: Recent advances in image-space adaptive sampling and reconstruction. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Courses (SIGGRAPH’15). ACM, New York, NY, Article 11, 255 pages.

Digital Library

[42]

Kenneth Chiu Peter Shirley and Changyaw Wang. 1994. Multi-jittered sampling. Graphics Gems IV 4 (1994), 370.

Digital Library

[43]

Martin Stich, Heiko Friedrich, and Andreas Dietrich. 2009. Spatial splits in bounding volume hierarchies. In Proc. High-Performance Graphics 2009.

Digital Library

[44]

Kartic Subr, Gurprit Singh, and Wojciech Jarosz. 2016. Fourier analysis of numerical integration in Monte Carlo rendering: Theory and practice. In ACM SIGGRAPH Courses. ACM, New York, NY.

Digital Library

[45]

László Szécsi, László Szirmay-Kalos, and Csaba Kelemen. 2003. Variance reduction for russian-roulette. In The 11th International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision’2003, WSCG 2003, in co-operation with EUROGRAPHICS and IFIP working group 5.10 on Computer Graphics and Virtual Worlds, University of West Bohemia, Campus Bory, Plzen-Bory, Czech Republic, February 3-7, 2003. http://wscg.zcu.cz/wscg2003/Papers_2003/C29.pdf.

[46]

Eric Veach. 1998. Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford, CA. Advisor(s) Guibas, Leonidas J. AAI9837162.

Digital Library

[47]

Jiří Vorba, Ondřej Karlík, Martin Šik, Tobias Ritschel, and Jaroslav Křivánek. 2014. On-line learning of parametric mixture models for light transport simulation. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2014) 33, 4 (Aug. 2014).

Digital Library

[48]

Martin Šik, Hisanari Otsu, Toshiya Hachisuka, and Jaroslav Křivánek. 2016. Robust light transport simulation via metropolised bidirectional estimators. ACM Trans. Graph. 35, 6, Article 245 (Nov. 2016), 12 pages.

Digital Library

[49]

Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Michael Donikian, and Donald P. Greenberg. 2005. Lightcuts: A scalable approach to illumination. ACM Trans. Graph. 24, 3 (July 2005), 1098--1107.

Digital Library

[50]

Lance Williams. 1983. Pyramidal parametrics. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH’83). ACM, New York, NY, 1--11.

Digital Library

[51]

Sven Woop, Attila T. Áfra, and Carsten Benthin. 2017. STBVH: A spatial-temporal bvh for efficient multi-segment motion blur. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG’17). ACM, New York, NY, Article 8, 8 pages.

Digital Library

[52]

Sven Woop, Carsten Benthin, Ingo Wald, Gregory S. Johnson, and Eric Tabellion. 2014. Exploiting local orientation similarity for efficient ray traversal of hair and fur. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG’14). Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, 41--49. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2980009.2980014

Digital Library

[53]

Magnus Wrenninge. 2009. Field3D. (2009). https://github.com/imageworks/Field3D

[54]

Magnus Wrenninge. 2016. Efficient rendering of volumetric motion blur using temporally unstructured volumes. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 5, 1 (31 January 2016), 1--34. http://jcgt.org/published/0005/01/01/

Cited By

Li YZhu CNichols GKutz PHuang WAdler DBurley BTeece D(2024)Cache Points for Production-Scale Occlusion-Aware Many-Lights Sampling and Volumetric ScatteringProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670993(1-19)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670993
Stein CHellmuth CConty Estevez ALecocq PGritz L(2024)Spear: Across the Streaming Multiprocessors: Porting a Production Renderer to the GPUProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670988(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670988
Greenstein D(2024)Evolving a Testsuite for Shading and RenderingACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks10.1145/3641233.3664350(1-2)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641233.3664350
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Sony Pictures Imageworks Arnold
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Rendering
      1. Ray tracing

Recommendations

RenderMan: An Advanced Path-Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering
Special Issue On Production Rendering and Regular Papers

Pixar’s RenderMan renderer is used to render all of Pixar’s films and by many film studios to render visual effects for live-action movies. RenderMan started as a scanline renderer based on the Reyes algorithm, and it was extended over the years with ...
Arnold: A Brute-Force Production Path Tracer
Special Issue On Production Rendering and Regular Papers

Arnold is a physically based renderer for feature-length animation and visual effects. Conceived in an era of complex multi-pass rasterization-based workflows struggling to keep up with growing demands for complexity and realism, Arnold was created to ...
Interactive Display of Isosurfaces with Global Illumination

In many applications, volumetric data sets are examined by displaying isosurfaces, surfaces where the data, or some function of the data, takes on a given value. Interactive applications typically use local lighting models to render such surfaces. This ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 37, Issue 3

Special Issue On Production Rendering and Regular Papers

June 2018

198 pages

ISSN:0730-0301

EISSN:1557-7368

DOI:10.1145/3243123

Editor:
Kavita Bala
Cornell University

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2018

Accepted: 01 January 2018

Received: 01 November 2017

Published in TOG Volume 37, Issue 3

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

26
Total Citations
View Citations
954
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)80
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8

Reflects downloads up to 11 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Li YZhu CNichols GKutz PHuang WAdler DBurley BTeece D(2024)Cache Points for Production-Scale Occlusion-Aware Many-Lights Sampling and Volumetric ScatteringProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670993(1-19)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670993
Stein CHellmuth CConty Estevez ALecocq PGritz L(2024)Spear: Across the Streaming Multiprocessors: Porting a Production Renderer to the GPUProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670988(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670988
Greenstein D(2024)Evolving a Testsuite for Shading and RenderingACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks10.1145/3641233.3664350(1-2)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641233.3664350
Ogaki S(2023)Nonlinear Ray Tracing for Displacement and Shell MappingSIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers10.1145/3610548.3618199(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610548.3618199
Back JHua BHachisuka TMoon B(2023)Input-Dependent Uncorrelated Weighting for Monte Carlo DenoisingSIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers10.1145/3610548.3618177(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610548.3618177
Pepper JKloc BTether KKim JKerley LAndrewartha JGottlieb DViris TBach TPiwowar OJones SBain A(2023)Building ChronopolisProceedings of the 2023 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3603521.3604292(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603521.3604292
Firmino AFrisvad JJensen H(2023)Denoising-Aware Adaptive Sampling for Monte Carlo Ray TracingACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Conference Proceedings10.1145/3588432.3591537(1-11)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3588432.3591537
Zhang PMarschner ZSolomon JTamstorf R(2023)Sum-of-Squares Collision Detection for Curved Shapes and PathsACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Conference Proceedings10.1145/3588432.3591507(1-11)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3588432.3591507
Liu ZHuang JRocha AMalmros JZhang J(2023)Importance-Based Ray Strategies for Dynamic Diffuse Global IlluminationProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/35855006:1(1-20)Online publication date: 16-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3585500
Chen HGu JLiu YMagid SDong CWang QPfister HZhu L(2023)Masked Image Training for Generalizable Deep Image Denoising2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00169(1692-1703)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00169
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents