Production Volume Rendering: a review

Posted: 13 Nov 2012 19:54
Tags: book pvr review

Finding your way through the computer graphics litterature jungle is hard: for most of the subjects, you will find a plethora of papers, all claiming to bring forward a decisive breakthrough. Most of the time, you will find that the brand new technique does not fit into existing rendering architectures, gobbles gigs of memory or that it adresses only a subset of your problem. Building a consistent rendering system is a difficult task.

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"Production Volumetric Rendering: design and implementation" written by Magnus Wrenninge, a technical director at Sony Pictures Imageworks, is an attempt to clear the mess for a specific domain: volumetric rendering techniques. It does not try to describe all rendering techniques available in the litterature, instead, it focuses only on techniques used in the visual effects industry by people that need to deliver on budget and time. Following "Physically Based Rendering" path, it provides a complete rendering system (PVR) and centers the book around the source code.

The architecture Wrenninge advocates is deceptively simple: modeling tools fill voxel buffers raymarched by renderers. Of course, in the book, you will get a lot more details but, in the end, it does not get any further.

The book is divided in three main parts: basics, volume modeling, volume rendering. It may seem strange to discuss modeling in a rendering book but, while creating a polygon soup is quite obvious, building convincing volumes is not for the casual user. After all, one must fill these damn voxel buffers!

I have mixed feelings about this book. In all three parts, the technical content is really excellent and interesting (I particularly liked the chapters on the theoritical foundations of raymarching or on phase functions). The design choices are well explained and the example images (all computed with PVR) are a good proof of their validity.

However, the comments on the companion source code are frequently over extended when they address topics that deal more with programming than rendering. Even worse, they are sometimes redundant (for instance, the various discussions on attributes)1. The modeling part, even for my naïve eyes, is over simplified: there is no mention of fluid dynamics for example.

Finally, this book lacks a conclusion chapter: clues for the reader to extend and improve the system, hints to create animations, something to give the reader the compelling need to go beyond.

To summarize, the book could have been better but you will really get valuable information from it.

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