A Brief History of Rendering
From the turn of the century, technology has advanced at an unreal pace. In my lifetime alone I have witnessed the birth of the modern internet, the creation of smartphones, streaming platforms and the ever ongoing advancement of microprocessors.
One of the largest improvements over the last twenty or so years has been in real-time rendering technology. With literally trillions of floating-point operations calculated in mere milliseconds, fantastical worlds that were nothing more than a pipe dream twenty years ago can be rendered and explored.
Currently, the video game industry is a multi-billion dollar sector and only increasing in growth. What is interesting to look at are the game engines themselves and how they are being used outside of the industry.
To understand the scale of this, remember the original Toy Story movie back in 1995. It was the first full-length CGI animated movie. In 1995, real-time rendering was nowhere near up to the task of creating something as complex and detailed as Toy Story. For the movie to be rendered, animators had 117 computers that were running 24/7.
Each frame of the movie could take anywhere from 45 minutes to 30 hours to render, depending on the complexity of the scene. The movie has around 114,240 frames or runtime of about 77 minutes. So you can imagine that it wasn’t exactly done overnight.
Jump forward a few years to 1998 when Unreal Engine was created by Epic Games, a game engine capable of real-time rendering. The capabilities of the engine were first showcased with the first-person shooter video game “Unreal”. Now at this time, in terms of graphical fidelity and complexity, real-time rendering was light-years behind the detail seen in Toy Story.
However, it was a good start and set the bar for what this technology could accomplish in the future.
Dedicated graphics processing units (or GPUs) have also continued to advance through the years to the point where they are now able to render in real-time something called “ray tracing”.
As time moved on and technology continued to advance, Unreal Engine went through many revisions and advancements to become the version we have today, Unreal Engine 4. Dedicated graphics processing units (or GPUs) have also continued to advance through the years to the point where they are now able to render in real-time something called “ray tracing”.
Now ray tracing had been around for years before this point, but due to its computational cost, it was only ever used where long render times could be tolerated, for example, rendering high fidelity visual effects for movies. Ray tracing allows for a multitude of optical effects to be rendered with a high amount of realism, such as reflections, refractions, shadows and scattering.
When Two Industries Come Together
So why is any of this important? Well, in recent years, Unreal Engine has found itself being used for much more than just real-time rendering in video games. The film and TV industry has adopted it to use for rendering incredibly high detail worlds and set pieces.
One of the more prevalent examples of this can be seen in Disney’s “The Mandalorian ” in which Unreal was used to render a multitude of the weird and wonderful alien planets visited through the show. Some scenes in “Finding Dory” were rendered in real-time using Unreal.
The graphical fidelity on offer in these examples is clearly leaps and bounds beyond what Toy Story was able to accomplish back in 1995. This is, of course, a massive win for the movie industry in general as the cost of real-time rendering is astronomically less than having to run 117 computers 24/7 for months on end.
The ongoing advancement of all this technology has recently culminated in a fantastic showcase of the BBC and their overview of the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games. Due to ongoing travel restrictions at the time of writing, the team at the BBC were unable to travel to Tokyo to provide coverage of the games.
Instead, they decided to use real-time rendering to give the illusion that they were filming from a set in Tokyo when, in fact, they were broadcasting from a set in Salford. The entire set consisted entirely of green screens with the ‘set’ being rendered in real-time using Unreal Engine and then broadcast live to all of us at home watching their coverage of the games. The fact any of this was possible is incredible.
This leaves an unimaginable potential for the future of real-time rendering being utilised in this way. Unreal Engine 5 is on the horizon with a multitude of new rendering technologies and, as always, technology continues to advance rapidly. I, for one, look forward to seeing what can be accomplished with the crossing of technologies from the video game, television, and film industries.
If you enjoyed this post, check out our visualisations for the future of technology in the legal sector here.