I appreciate the clear description of local vs global illumination. This isn't quite what the article is discussing though.
Pixar have had a global illumination system in place at least since Up, and maybe earlier [1]. However, it was one that integrated with their rasterizer.
The article is now claiming that Pixar have switched to Raytracing exclusively, which really is actually a HUGE change, as Renderman only introduced raytracing at all with Cars 2. Every prior Pixar movie exclusively used a micropolygon rasterizer for rendering.
The article also claims:
> ray tracing is a relatively advanced CG lighting technique
Well, not really. Ray tracing - at least Whitted-style ray tracing - is about as simple as physically-based rendering gets. It's making it fast that gets complex, but it's possible to write a basic ray tracer in a few hours if you know what you're doing.
Wait a sec, I thought that customers were asking for ray tracing in RenderMan before then and they used the first Cars as a testbed for those capabilities.
Pixar have had a global illumination system in place at least since Up, and maybe earlier [1]. However, it was one that integrated with their rasterizer.
The article is now claiming that Pixar have switched to Raytracing exclusively, which really is actually a HUGE change, as Renderman only introduced raytracing at all with Cars 2. Every prior Pixar movie exclusively used a micropolygon rasterizer for rendering.
The article also claims:
> ray tracing is a relatively advanced CG lighting technique
Well, not really. Ray tracing - at least Whitted-style ray tracing - is about as simple as physically-based rendering gets. It's making it fast that gets complex, but it's possible to write a basic ray tracer in a few hours if you know what you're doing.
[1] http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedGlobalIlluminati...