CUR - The Council on Undergraduate Research

The Dawn of Real-Time Rendering Solutions: An Exploration into the Integration of Real-Time Rendering Solutions in the Pipeline for Production

Stephen Abraham, Emil Polyak, Department of Digital Media, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Ever since the earliest renderers were developed in the late 1980’s, digital production pipelines have invested a lot of resources in speeding up the rendering aspect of the pipeline. Now with the advent of more powerful Graphical Units (GPU) with innate raytracing abilities, real-time rendering solutions have been massively researched and highlighted upon. The dominant explanation for this trend is with the advent of game engines employing a similar rendering philosophy from the earliest days of video game inception. Previous research has shown especially with the revolution of the Unreal Engines of the significant speed increase in real time rendering and why more and more video games are shifting towards the employment of technology based on the Unreal Engine system of real time rendering. With the introduction of Blender’s own real time renderer “EEVEE”, the trend shows that almost every major production studio has an interest in researching more real time rendering options due to the cost reduction it has on the pipeline budget. For this investigation, we setup specific scene renders for three specific renderers- “EEVEE”, “Cycles” and “Arnold” following which we compared the respective times and aesthetic features based on the inclusion of Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) and Light Proxies (LP). The results show that the real time rendering of EEVEE is significantly faster than the renders of Cycles and ARNOLD on a generic scene level. In addition we introduced more complicated features such as the SSS and LP to investigate further render efficiency. 

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