ALL ABOUT ARTVPS, PURE CARDS, RENDERDRIVES and RAYBOX
by Mark Segasby from Protograph Ltd
I have written this piece because I still find a lot of confusion on forums, with my contemporaries and clients about ARTVPS and their products - even after a visit to their web site. I think this may put the record straight for the uninitiated. But it is only my opinion!!!
Introduction
Let's start at the beginning. ARTVPS developed their own patented ray tracing silicon chips dedicated to the task of ray tracing 3D data. These were initially developed back in the days when Pentium 90Mhz processors were cutting edge and most rendering was scan-line, ray tracing took too long.
To talk to these specialist processors (AR250 was first generation, AR350 second generation and AR500 is current generation of processor) and get a picture out of them, ARTVPS wrote some amazing rendering software, Renderpipe. Why was is amazing? Well, the way it rendered great soft shadows from area lights and ray-traced beautiful reflections, even blurry reflections, yonks before anyone else could do that.
Images were very realistic and better than anything else on the market.
So the ARTVPS solution relied on using their special chips and software together. Plug-ins were then written for Maya and Max (plus Catia and Viz) so your scene files could be translated into a file for the chips to render. The plug-ins were (and are) very well integrated and support nearly all Maya and Max shader nodes plus additional photo-real shaders developed by ARTVPS. In fact scenes are sent to the hardware as RIB files, which is the Renderman scene description language developed by Pixar. Also Renderman is implemented actually at the chip level, which is all very clever indeed.
Above: 16chip Pure Card and The Renderdrive RD5000
The Hardware
The hardware could be bought as a card to put in your PC, The Pure Card, or as a network rendering device, The Renderdrive. The clever thing about the chips was they could be used in parallel on a single render, and they were also dual core long before dual core chips were around in PCs. So a Pure card had 8 or 16 chips on it, and the Renderdrives had 18, 36 or 48 (this is on the RD3500s & RD5000s, later came RD6400s with 16 or 32 chips, but they were more efficient and faster (also there were earlier Renderdrives but I can't remember the product codes, it's not that important, you get the picture!)). The cool thing about the Renderdrive is that you can simply plug it in and add it to your network, install your 3D plug-in and you are ready to go. It's that simple! If you were running out of render power then buy an extra drive and have it working in minutes. It's all controlled from a web interface.
Image based lighting
But as time moved on, so did Intel and AMD chip speeds, then other software renderers had more power to play with and could do more complex and realistic rendering. So to keep ahead the ARTVPS renderer added more lighting options such as the HDRSkylight, which was at the cutting edge of integrating HDR image based lighting and reflections into computer rendering. This new feature really took off with the automotive industry and their photographers and ad agencies were queuing up to buy Renderdrives to replace traditional photo shoots. Locations could be captured with a Spheron HDR camera, a background image photographed and then any CG car could be rendered seamlessly into the captured environment. This made sense considering the cars were designed with computers so the data was readily available.
64bit - Cheaper & Faster Renderdrives
The next big thing for ARTVPS was launching the Renderdrive 6400s. These were based on standard PC components with their render cards inside running with a 64bit host processors (AMD) running a cut down version of Linux (so were the old Renderdrives, but the hardware was all custom made!). Renderdrives had always been very robust and reliable, and the new 6400s continued this. This also led to the price coming down and the technology got into many more peoples hands.
Market Confusion
There was and is much confusion in the computer graphics market about ARTVPS products and I think their marketing and promises of super fast render times didn't help. Maybe my explanation above is the first time you have understood what ARTVPS is about. (if you are into these kind of things?) Most potential customers thought it could accelerate their normal rendering software and that they could render files from any software renderer. But in fact what ARTVPS offered was a hardware and software solution that worked together to produce cutting edge realism especially with shiny objects and HDR image based lighting.
Overtaken
Other renderers have now caught up and overtaken ARTVPS in many areas, even render speed. Most of the speed got used up in making images even more realistic with HDR and users pushing more complex scenes through it. But this led to many new users who were expecting very fast results to be disappointed by their expensive hardware because they had unrealistic expectations from the marketing hype.
But Renderpipe was the first major renderer that took the unbiased approach you see with Maxwell Render and Fry Render today - starting off with a grainy image and throwing more and more rays of light at the scene until it renders towards a final smooth image. ARTVPS images have stood the test of time and are still hard to tell form a photograph. In the right hands the Renderpipe renderer is still a very powerful tool.
Moving On
Many ARTVPS customers have moved on from using the solution for what I feel are the following reasons:
High Cost of Hardware - once you start using dedicated hardware, there is only one place you can go to get more and if it's much more expensive than other solutions this is a problem. Global Illumination - ARTVPS promised this feature to users and failed to deliver a commercially usable version 3 years later. This meant anyone doing architectural interiors just couldn't stick with ARTVPS and it also made other GI renderers much more attractive to all ARTVPS users. Customers also took it more personally because after an investment made in expensive hardware, it hurts even more when raised expectations are not met.
Lack of Realistic Materials: Sub surface scattering, metals and transparent materials were not developed to match the quality of the other ARTVPS shaders, leading to limitations for certain types of render work.
New Multi Core processors: Modern 8 core machines can outperform a Renderdrive for a lot fo 3D work and run any software renderer you choose! Need I say more?
Renderdrives are dead - Welcome Raybox!
Today ARTVPS don't make any Renderdrives which is such a shame. They have packaged their render card with 14 brand new AR500 processors into a PCIx external box which you can plug into any PC with a PCIx slot, the Raybox is around as fast as a 32chip (AR350s) 6400 but costs only £1,995 compared to over £10k for the old 32chip drive. To build a substantial render farm with these is a lot of hassle compared to building one from network ready appliances like the Renderdrive. There are so many wires and power sockets needed and the extra admin for each computer needed to drive it. Rayboxes can be added together on one machine with a maximum of 3, but not efficiently - you are best to have one Raybox per computer. If only ARTVPS could have come up with a small Renderdrive unit you could just plug in to your network. I understand they have removed the 'hardware trap' by allowing you to add the Raybox onto an existing rendering computer/node that can run your other software renderers - this means the price is lower. But many of us were hoping for some serious render power with new generation Renderdrives featuring the new more powerful AR500 processors, this has only been used in the Raybox to date. A Renderdrive with 42 new processors in (14 x 3) would have really rendered fast and is just what we could do with!
Protograph, CAD data and Renderdrives - our experience!
Here at Protograph we have 26 Renderdrives and still rely on them on a daily basis. They are our work horses. They are reliable and renders are easy and fast to set up. I think they are a big missed opportunity in CG and I am really passionate about how great they still are. It's such a shame more people haven't taken the time to really understand the benefits of this technology and use it more. In fairness the high cost prevented many potential users from using them.
Example of a very complex interior that renders with ease on our Renderdrives. Our client pressed render in their software and came back the next morning and nothing had happended - this is when we were called in to render the 3 carriages in a row. You can see from one end to the other, that's a lot of data.
We have tried lots of other solutions to Renderdrives. We would love someone to show us something better. But after everything said so far.... we just can't find any solution that is better for rendering CAD data. We don't do polygons, we take complex nurbs files and send them to the Renderdrives and they eat them for breakfast. They are seriously fast at this!!!
We save so much time in scene set up that sometimes it doesn't matter that the renders could be done faster another way. Whilst Mental Ray is still trying to convert the nurbs into polygons and create a scene, the Renderdrives have already started to render. It's incredible, they are an industrial strength rendering solution. Because image feedback is quick with the Renderdrives creating a preview image and refining it as the render progresses, it's great for setting up the lighting and materials. We can't afford to wait all night for Maxwell renders to see if they turn out good enough only to spot something is wrong and wait another day. Do you know anyone producing Maxwell animations yet in sensible timescales? If you are I really would like to know (mark@protograph.co.uk). Our main selling point is that we can work fast - some clients can't believe what we can do in a few days or in a few hours, and that's down to Renderdrives - a technology that has gone underneath many peoples radar.
Exmaple of the quality of raytracing that makes this lense on an industrial product look photo real. This is ideal work for the Renderdrives.
So for the time being we'll be sticking to Renderdrives whilst keeping a keen eye on and continually testing out other render solutions - as we have been doing for the last 4 years!
Mark Segasby is founder of Protograph Ltd, a 3D visualisation firm based in the UK that is dedicated to working with companies that need visuals producing from their CAD files.