Another milestone at work. PRMan 12.5 was released today, although the announcements don’t seem to have made it to Pixar’s web site yet. Yes, raytracing really is a lot faster in this release. The factor of three mentioned in the release notes aren’t an exaggeration, so if you’re doing a movie with occlusion, you should upgrade pronto. No, we weren’t doing something stupid in previous releases, it was a concerted optimization effort that paid off handsomely.
Of course, the real reason to upgrade is hierarchical subdivision surfaces since they’re the coolest thing since sliced bread. Locally refined detail only where you need it, and even the ability to animate in a hierarchical fashion – think deforming a character’s torso to show him breathing in and out; then think deforming just the part of his chest wall where his heart flutters. Easy with hsubdivs without having to think about modelling the character that way from the get go. Even if you don’t buy into hierarchical edits, hierarchical subdivs along with saved attributes solve the problem of applying different shading sets to different pieces of the same mesh and still have those pieces meet in a continuous fashion (and without any alpha holes), without having to resort to specifying disjoint meshes with overlapping faces.
Can you tell which part of the software I worked hardest on?
