管道渲染 effect_超越预渲染的进步：用于统一的MARZA电影管道-CSDN博客

管道渲染 effect

The wonderful artistry we see in CG films often masks an expensive, expansive and tedious grind behind the scenes. Using traditional rendering approaches, months and years can disappear before a project is finished. Despite the increasingly rapid advancement of technology to render out high-quality visuals, not much has changed to address costly issues like lengthy timelines, pricey equipment, slow iteration and review cycles, and the inability to check final quality until late stages. Not content with the status quo, legendary animation studio MARZA, known for creating eye-catching animations for the likes of Sonic and the film SPACE PIRATE CAPTAIN HARLOCK, set out in search of a new, more efficient approach.

我们在CG电影中看到的奇妙艺术性常常掩盖了幕后的昂贵，广阔和乏味的磨练。使用传统的渲染方法，几个月和几年可以在项目完成之前消失。尽管提供高质量视觉效果的技术日新月异，但是解决诸如昂贵的时间表，昂贵的设备，缓慢的迭代和审查周期以及无法检查最终质量直到后期的昂贵问题并没有太大改变。具有传奇色彩的动画工作室MARZA不满足于现状，该工作室以为Sonic和电影SPACE PIRATE CAPTAIN HARLOCK等电影制作引人注目的动画而着称，其目的是寻找一种更有效的新方法。

For MARZA, as a subsidiary of gaming giant SEGA, game engines were familiar but remained an untapped avenue of exploration to solve their need. Unity’s 3D engine had cracked rendering and production for gaming and VR, why couldn’t it be extended into the worlds of animation and cinema? Both games and film are built by a collection of artists, designers and engineers, after all. So, with an eye on extending a new, improved work flow to CG animation — without sacrificing graphic quality — MARZA tapped the Unity engine.

对于游戏巨头SEGA的子公司MARZA来说，游戏引擎虽然很熟悉，但仍然是探索其需求的未开发途径。 Unity的3D引擎已经破解了游戏和VR的渲染和生产，为什么不能将其扩展到动画和电影世界呢？毕竟，游戏和电影都是由艺术家，设计师和工程师组成的。因此，为了在不牺牲图形质量的情况下将新的改进工作流程扩展到CG动画，MARZA选择了Unity引擎。

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There was no need to reinvent the wheel: the MARZA team was able to establish a production process that leveraged existing CG technology by creating a method that allowed individuals to work across their various platforms, without radically remaking them. To achieve the level of expression we’ve come to expect from modern CG, feature-quality character motions and shaders (previously near-impossible to obtain through game engines), were introduced through a blend of Unity, composite software, and custom solutions.

无需重新发明轮子：MARZA团队能够建立一种利用现有CG技术的生产流程，方法是创建一种方法，使个人可以跨各种平台工作，而无需彻底改造它们。为了达到我们期望的现代CG表达水平，结合了Unity，复合软件和自定义解决方案，引入了功能质量的角色运动和着色器(以前几乎不可能通过游戏引擎获得)。

The result, The MARZA Movie Pipeline for Unity, a plugin to streamline movie production. For the first time, MARZA’s development, engineering and production teams got to work near-simultaneously. Where before production would typically run six to seven months, in just five short months (an improvement of 20-30%), The Gift was created.

结果是MARZA Movie Pipeline for Unity，这是一个用于简化电影制作的插件。 MARZA的开发，工程和生产团队第一次几乎可以同时工作。在制作之前通常要花6到7个月而不是短短五个月(提高20-30％)的地方，就创建了The Gift。

The team largely accomplished this on their own. But to put the finishing touches on the project MARZA turned to Unity, whose engineers jumped at the chance to team up. One of the pipeline’s most useful elements were the Unity-developed custom Alembic Importer and Frame Capturer now open sourced and available on Github. The Alembic Importer allows complex geometry data from other software like Houdini or Maya to be brought into Unity. Frame Capturer allows for the generation of an EXR image file sequence from the game view, in a process called capturing. These sequences can then be imported into software like Nuke, Fusion or After Affects, for example, for final compositing. On this specific project, the team further customized these tools and used them as a base in higher level tools to obtain the high quality result.

团队很大程度上是靠自己完成的。但是为了使该项目画龙点睛，MARZA求助于Unity，Unity的工程师抓住了合作的机会。管道中最有用的元素之一是Unity开发的自定义 Alembic Importer 和 Frame Capturer，现已在Github上开源并可用。 Alembic Importer允许将来自其他软件(如Houdini或Maya)的复杂几何数据导入Unity。 Frame Capturer允许在称为捕获的过程中从游戏视图生成EXR图像文件序列。然后可以将这些序列导入到Nuke，Fusion或After Affects等软件中，以进行最终合成。在这个特定项目上，团队进一步定制了这些工具，并将它们用作更高级别工具的基础，以获得高质量的结果。

While still able to work in their preferred standard Alembic Mesh, artists could now quickly iterate on scene creation and layout, making for some dramatic improvements in overall efficiency. With one push of a button, they could automatically render a scene, and artists were able to go back and make updates or fine polish details even after scene creation — no more time (hours!) spent rendering. In turn, MARZA artists could focus on their own work, at their own rate, without having to worry about impacting the production’s overall timeline. The broader team also shared in the added benefit of seeing near-final quality visuals even at the earliest stages of production.

尽管仍然可以在其首选标准Alembic Mesh中工作，但艺术家现在可以快速迭代场景的创建和布局，从而在整体效率上取得了显着的提高。只需按一下按钮，他们就可以自动渲染场景，并且即使在创建场景之后，艺术家也可以返回并进行更新或精细抛光细节-无需花费更多的时间(小时！)进行渲染。反过来，MARZA的艺术家可以按照自己的速度专注于自己的作品，而不必担心会影响作品的整体时间表。更广泛的团队还分享了即使在生产的最初阶段也能看到接近最终质量的视觉效果的额外好处。

Put into practice, the Alembic Importer played a critical role in overcoming a challenge centered on one pivotal scene. Our heroine “sets sail” on a sea of milllions of plastic balls, which flood the camera quickly while surging and shifting shape, a very particle-heavy push for the engine. Created using Maya, Houdini and Unity, the sequence was first exported as geometry, which didn’t quite work — it simply couldn’t be lit smoothly. Using the Alembic Importer tool, along with a custom shader, they were able to quickly process a huge amount of data so individual balls, each lit and shaded, rendered smoothly. The result is an awe-inspiring mass of independent objects that maintain their identity while somehow flowing together in one harmonious sequence. This is just one example of the impact that raw data-processing power can have, and a clear indication of the workflow’s real potential to improve not just efficiency, but actual output.

在实践中，Alembic进口商在克服以一个关键场景为中心的挑战方面发挥了关键作用。我们的女主人公在数以百万计的塑料球中“起航”，这些塑料球在汹涌而变化的形状中Swift注满相机，这对发动机来说是非常重的推动力。该序列是使用Maya，Houdini和Unity创建的，首先导出为几何图形，但效果不佳-根本无法流畅地照明。使用Alembic Importer工具以及自定义的着色器，他们能够快速处理大量数据，因此可以对每个球(分别进行照明和着色)进行平滑渲染。结果是令人敬畏的大量独立对象保持了自己的身份，同时又以一种和谐的顺序流动在一起。这只是原始数据处理能力可能产生的影响的一个示例，并且清楚地表明了工作流不仅可以提高效率，而且可以提高实际输出的真正潜力。

The team’s successful collaboration on and implementation of The MARZA Movie Pipeline, which will be available later this year, is of course only the beginning. Not only does the workflow carry impact for gaming, but an ideology that can easily expand to digital content projects and developments across film and VR. Some in the film industry at large have been early observers of the benefits of Unity’s real-time rendering capabilities…fellow pioneers, take note and stay tuned.

当然，该团队在MARZA Movie Pipeline上的成功合作和实施(将在今年晚些时候推出)当然仅仅是开始。该工作流程不仅对游戏产生影响，而且可以轻松地扩展到电影和 VR 上的数字内容项目和开发的意识形态。整个电影行业中的某些人是Unity实时渲染功能的好处的早期观察者 ……资深先驱，请注意并保持关注。

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