3D Animation- Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Screen.

Virtual Production, or Virtual Movie making, is a new, visually dynamic, non-linear workflow. It blends virtual camera systems, advanced motion and performance capture, 3D software and practical 3D assets with real time render display technology, enabling filmmakers to interactively visualize and explore digital scenes for the production of feature films and game cinematic's.  


“Virtual Movie making can liberate filmmakers from the often stifling visual effects and animation process by allowing them to experience the production in much the same way they do while shooting live action.   They are immersed in the world of their film and the entire production benefits immensely from that kind of immediate creative discovery and problem solving 

Rob Powers, Pioneered the first 
Virtual Art Department for Avatar (check out his amazing website by clicking his name)

Computer Performance 

Several trends in computer performance are facilitating real time calculation and display of 3D computer scenes and animation: 

Central Processing Unit

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of the computer has increased in speed. CPU 
performance is measured in terms of clock speed (Hertz) – which is the speed at which the processor can change state from 0 to 1. At the time of writing processor performance exceeded 3:0 GHz or 3 billion cycles a second. 

Multi-Core Processors

However there are physical limits to how far you can push processor speeds until you start getting undesirable quantum effects. As a result chip manufacturers have started developing multi-core processors instead of trying to increase clock speed. These processors offer more efficient and faster processing to highly multi-threaded applications –software where the processing algorithms have been specifically designed to run in parallel.

Graphics Processing Unit

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPUs) is a specialized processor for rendering 3D graphics. Although many PC motherboards have GPUs built-in, high-end graphics cards from NVIDIA and ATI offer better performance. GPU efficiency and parallelization enable significant performance increases to applications whose rendering algorithms have been GPU optimized. 

3D Shaders 

3D shaders are software instructions describing how 3D objects should be rendered. They are executed on the GPU (graphics processing unit) of a computer graphics card.  Each shader provides precise instructions on how the 3D data should be rendered and displayed. Common types of shader include pixel, vertex and geometry shaders Shaders can be created using one of several specialized programming languages: 

- HLSL (High Level Shader Language)  
- GLSL (OpenGL Shader Language) 
- Cg (C for Graphics) 

Recent developments in programmable graphics such as GPCPU (general purpose computing on CPUs) enable very sophisticated rendering pipelines to be implemented; and companies like Nvidia are further expanding graphics programming capabilities with technologies like CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). One of the biggest challenges for developers remains the hardware specificity of many software development kits (SDK’s) and application programming interfaces (API’s). This can cause unpredictability in results and might require work to be done twice when working with different graphics pipelines (e.g. Direct3D versus OpenGL, Nvidia versus ATI). However the fact remains that continued progress in this field will drive increasing image quality and photo-realism in real-time graphics display. 

To read more on this subject download your free Ebook from AUTODESK
®WHITEPAPER  :The New Art of Virtual Moviemaking-Download -->Here<--