This here was rendered on an Amiga using raytracing from 1986.
Today there are many computer animated films are rendered through ray tracing techniques, such as Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan.
On 1995 computer hardware, the average frame of Toy Story took two hours to render. A decade later on 2005 hardware, how long did it take the average frame of Cars to render?
- 30 minutes
- 1 hour
- 2 hours
- 15 hours
Answer: D. The average Cars frame took 15 hours, despite a 300x overall increase in compute power. The artists have an essentially infinite appetite for detail and realism, and Pixar's resources have grown over the decade so it can afford to allocate more computers to the task, allowing each to run longer to achieve the artist's and animator's ambitions for the scenes.
The dimensions of the original juggler are 320 x 200. It's possible we could render the ray traced Amiga juggler today in real time at close to 30 fps-- but barely. Despite many hyperbolic marketing claims of "rendering Toy Story in real time", real time ray tracing remains something of a holy grail in practice-- considering Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. Who knows what we'll be able to render in the next 20 years?
