

The future of 3D creation: on the web? - bhouston
http://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/the-future-of-3d-creation-on-the-web/

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filearts
Amazing the power that is being consolidated onto the browser platform.

I saw a demo of Lagoa[1] this week which would interface very well with this
type of product (clara.io). You could have both the creation and materials /
rendering without the burden of your own render farm and without the cost of
some of the high-end software normally required.

In the demo I saw, it was pretty amazing to see an accurately rendered sneaker
being moved in real-time with its colors being changed at the click of the
button. Even over the slow wi-fi, results streamed immediately and
progressively got more and more detailed.

[1] [http://home.lagoa.com/features/](http://home.lagoa.com/features/)

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bhouston
Good suggestion. It is a needed feature.

We've implemented streaming progressive renders using V-Ray (a premium and
very popular renderer in the visual effects and architecture world) in
Clara.io in a similar fashion to Lagoa. Here is a video of how it works in
Clara.io:

[http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/news.html?single=544](http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/news.html?single=544)

We haven't launched this feature officially, the above is a four month old
tech preview, but that will happen soon.

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kayoone
I always thought 3D content creation would be perfect for a web/cloud
approach. Use the client software anywhere on any HTML5 enabled device (even
tablets), hit Render and the cloud renders the scene and you have immediate
results.

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32bitkid
I agree, and I'm surprised that anyone would have ever had any doubts that the
industry -- or craft -- would move in this direction. And in fact, why have a
render button at all. Why not just batch changes to the scene and send them
off to the cloud to be rendered all the time?

Make a change? Cancel the job in the cloud and send a new one. Use a map-
reduce to build output movies an just have them available when done. "Render"
becomes "play when ready"

I think the 3d content creation world is ripe for disruption.

~~~
bhouston
Cloud computing is very expensive compared to storing changes in a database.
One computer can server hundreds/thousands of simultaneous users if you are
not rendering. But once you are rendering, a computer can serve only a small
fraction of that.

When in interactive rendering mode Clara.io does constantly render after each
batch of changes, but it is more than 20x as expensive as not rendering in
terms of server costs.

[https://vimeo.com/72194528](https://vimeo.com/72194528)

We want to make Clara.io as low cost as possible and one way we can do is to
not have it rendering all the time. :) But if you have deep pockets go for it!

The same concerns about cost apply to automatically creating the movie on each
change. Yes it is possible, but the cost for computing that may not be
required is pretty high.

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32bitkid
I'm not an expert in either cloud-computing or 3d rendering, so I'm not saying
that I've got it all figured out; "easy-peasy". But I do think there are some
ways to transform the problem that could be more beneficial than the
"traditional" render-farm approach that most of the industry seems tied to.

Things like, progressive enhancement rendering -- either quality or resolution
-- like wavelet compression for rendering. Massively parallelized rendering
pipelines -- borrowing from the high performance password cracking on GPUs,
and real-time game inspired rendering pipelines. Static scene analysis/dynamic
compositing; rather than require the artist to think about layering and
compositing, let the computer algorithmically break down a scene and maximize
rendering speed.

Perhaps it _will_ eventually be determined to not be cost effective -- and I'm
sure people much smarter than I are working on it -- but I think we will see
some really interesting and novel changes in this space in the next 5 years
after being relatively unchanged for the past 20.

And just for the record, I think Clara.io is fantastic, not saying you guys
are doing anything wrong, just talking. :)

~~~
bhouston
Yeah, the issue is GPU/CPU power required for photorealistic rendering is
really high right now and it is costly. If there is some way to bring it down,
which is outside of my area, then you are right the economics will change and
we can always do live updating progressive rendering for nearly nothing. This
will happen of course at some point, but I think we are at least a few years
away.

For now we just have high quality viewport that is similar to game quality
graphics, that is super cheap because it leverages the local GPU rather than
cloud resources.

~~~
Arelius
I think the problem is that the economics of offline rendering play out a bit
differently. We've been doing offline rendering for a pretty long time now.
And compute resources keep going up vs cost and time significantly, but the
price of rendering is so small versus the price of artists. That your
bottleneck is always* going to be on the artists, and improvements in
performance will always* be spent with improving visual fidelity once you get
past a certain speed.

Turns out, if you want high-quality(All quality is relative) rendering that
doesn't take much time at all, we can do it any modern game engine can output
decent image in about 30 ms. And an even better one still quicker than a human
can react. And there are tons of people which that is quite sufficient.

Videos from source filmmaker show that:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUhOnX8qt3I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUhOnX8qt3I)
[http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/](http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/)

Also see UE4 infiltrator:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bLOi3mo9NE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bLOi3mo9NE)

* I use always lightly here, that is of course not true on certain time scales.

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daneel
Don't forget about Verold ;(

[http://www.verold.com](http://www.verold.com)

Granted, Verold does not handle 3D _creation_ on the web. Instead we are
building a platform for creating interactive experiences using 3D content.
Eventually it will lead to a full fledged game development platform. Check it
out!

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malkia
Most of the browsers on Windows are still 32-bit, and knowing how much memory
Maya/MotionBuilder can take, especially with next-gen console looking stuff -
it makes me wonder how would that work?

I know the solution is to install 64-bit browser, but that doesn't seem to be
the default for most of the popular browser on 64-bit Windows machines (or
maybe other os's too)

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bhouston
For those looking for more information, a ton of information can be found here
on Clara.io:

[http://exocortex.com/blog/claraio_open_beta](http://exocortex.com/blog/claraio_open_beta)

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eonil
Well, current DCC tools market is really sucks by Autodesk monopoly. I wish
this to be a real competitive solution so the market to get real innovations.

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daredevildave
Model with Clara.io, animate with mixamo.com and develop your game with
PlayCanvas.com. The future of game development is online!

