Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Danaher Corporation

Gregory Nichols

Brent Burley

Christian Eisenacher

Andrew Selle

David M Adler

Sean Jenkins

Charles Tappan

Ralf Habel

Robert Alexander Lipsett

Henry Allen Driskill

Peter Kutz

Don C Alfano

Brett W Achorn

Edward Myers

Peter Paulsson

There is provided a method for ray-mediated illumination control. The method includes identifying a first activation region corresponding to one of an origin and a destination of a ray, where the ray is described by a ray data associated with the ray. The method further includes identifying a second activation region corresponding to the other one of the origin and the destination of the ray, interpreting an illumination rule for the ray based on at least one of the first activation region and the second activation region, and modifying an illumination in one of the first activation region and the second activation region based on the illumination rule and the ray data.

Ray-mediated illumination control

There is provided a scene rendering system and method for use by such a system to perform depth buffering for subsequent scene rendering. The system includes a memory storing a depth determination software including a reduced depth set identification software module, and a hardware processor configured to execute the depth determination software. The hardware processor is configured to execute the depth determination software to determine, before rendering a scene, a depth buffer based on at least one fixed depth identified for each element of a rendering framework for the scene. The hardware processor is further configured to render the scene using the depth buffer.

Depth buffering for subsequent scene rendering

There is provided a system and method of distribution caching for direct lights in a scene. The system including a memory and a processor configured to execute a rendering software application to shoot a plurality of rays through a scene that includes a plurality of lights, generate a plurality of cache points at different locations throughout the scene based on the shooting of the plurality of rays, compute a list of lights for each cache point from the plurality of cache points, the list of lights including lights from the plurality of lights that provide illumination at a location of the cache point, and store the plurality of cache points in a memory. The processor may further be configured to execute the rendering software application to render the scene using the cache point database.

Distribution caching for direct lights

There is provided a system and a method for ordering rays in rendered graphics for coherent shading. The method comprises recording, using the processor, intersection points for each of a plurality of directional queries in the memory, wherein each of the plurality of directional queries has one intersection point, organizing, using the processor, the intersection points in the memory into a plurality of elements, and grouping, using the processor, the intersection points in the memory by shading context. The method may further comprise shading the intersection points, wherein the shading is performed on a plurality of elements substantially concurrently. The shading context may include a volume of intersection points. In another implementation, the shading context may be one of texture ID, material ID, and element ID. Additionally, the texture ID may correspond to a mesh face ID.

Ordering rays in rendered graphics for coherent shading

A linear actuator includes a housing and a cover tube that is supported relative to the housing. A nut engages the cover tube so as to prevent rotation of the nut relative to the cover tube. A lead screw rotatably engages the nut, wherein rotation of the lead screw causes the nut to travel along the lead screw.

Linear actuator

A method is provided for distributed element rendering with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity requiring global illumination. A persistent centralized scheduler receives shading queries that are added to a request queue, determines an assignment of the request queue to hardware resources based on a resource map, and processes the request queue according to the assignment to render frames of one or more scenes. The resource map may be built by the scheduler and indicates local scene geometry cached for each of the hardware resources. By generating a full set of camera rays at each hardware resource, global illumination shading and other rendering can proceed independently against local geometry caches for high parallelism. Redundant computations are reduced through the scheduler, which may cache frequently requested rendering results including tessellation, shading, and level of detail.

Distributed element rendering

A method is provided for integration cone tracing with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity requiring global illumination. Instead of using a conventional noise prone ray tracer, cones are intersected with a scene bounding hierarchy to determine intersecting scene geometry, and integration results are computed by directional sampling within the cones. As a result, the working data set may be reduced as the rendering may begin with a smaller set of cones as compared to the large number of rays required for acceptable filtering in a conventional ray tracer. Furthermore, by refining the cones during the rendering only on an as-needed basis according to an acceptable noise threshold and by sharing secondary cone bounces among primary cones, the processing workload and data set requirements may be kept to a reasonable level even for multiple global illumination passes.

Integration cone tracing

Some aspects of the disclosure include systems and methods for grouping rays into sets according to their directions. In some cases, the rays of the directional sets may then be organized into a hierarchy according to their origins and bounding cones are generated for the hierarchy nodes. The resulting bounding cone hierarchy may be intersected with a bounding volume hierarchy or other scene hierarchy.

Ray cone hierarchy renderer

A method is provided for streaming light propagation with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity requiring art directed global illumination. By attaching a data recording shader or equivalent functionality to any tracing based renderer that can provide multi-pass global illumination, the complete set of light bounce propagation records and the set of emissive samples for a particular rendering can be recorded to memory or disk. A user may edit the emissive samples to adjust the lighting environment, including modifying light source color and intensity and even moving and adding new emissive samples. To relight the scene, the edited emissive samples are processed through the propagation records using a streaming multiply-and-add operation amenable to high levels of parallelization, avoiding a costly re-rendering of the scene and providing a final quality result in interactive time.

Streaming light propagation

A method is provided for a streaming hierarchy traversal renderer with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity that cannot fit in memory. The renderer organizes scene geometry into a spatial hierarchy, generates directional queries to be traced in the spatial hierarchy, performs a streaming hierarchy traversal over the directional queries, and uses the results of the directional queries to shade or render the scene. The traversal performs a single pass over the directional queries for splitting into one child stream of directional queries for each child node at each scene node in the hierarchy. A prioritized traversal of the hierarchy may also be carried out using various cost-metrics for optimized parallelism. The rendering may also bounce the directional queries to provide multi-pass global illumination.

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North Hollywood, CA, United States of America

Gregory Nichols