Could I render the computer-generated graphics from Toy Story (1995) in real time using a single modern home computer?

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• Mothra@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Hello, I’ve worked in 3D animation productions. Short answer: You can get close.

  Unreal Engine has the capacity to deliver something of similar quality in real time providing you have a powerful enough rig. You would need not only the hardware but also the technical know how to optimize several aspects of your scenes. Basically the knowledge of a mid to senior unreal TD and a mid to senior generalist combined to say the least.

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  • fargeol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Well, considering the existence of The Matrix Awakens on PS5, that sounds right.

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• wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I also work in 3D and I wanna say yes. If we’re talking solely about the technical aspect, real-time render today can definitely hold up to, or even surpass, the quality of renders from 30 years ago.

  If it would look exactly the same and how much work it would be to recreate the entire movie in a real time engine is another question.

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  • wax@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    But 1995 isn’t 30 years…ago…

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    • TerraRoot@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah! it was only… uh…

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• Ozymandias88@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Others have covered the topic of modern renders and their shortcuts but if you wanted an exact replica I think films like this are rendered on large HPC clusters.

  Looking at the Top500 stats for HPCs the average top500 cluster in 1995 was 1.1TFlops, and today that seems to be around 23.4PFlops.

  An increase of approximate 21,000 times.

  So 800,000 hours from 1995 is about 37 hours on today’s average top500 cluster.

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  • lefaucet@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    There have been massive improvements in algorithmic efficiencies too

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• pastel_de_airfryer@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Digital Foundry compared the first movie with Kingdom Hearts 3 back in 2017. Worth a watch.

  youtu.be/tkDadVrBr1Y

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  • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Super interesting watch, thanks for the link! Now I’m off to figure out where I was in my Kingdom Hearts play through

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  • fargeol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Wow, it feels like the only thing missing in KH3 is ray-tracing to have a closer result!

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  • HiddenLychee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    That game came out 8 years ago???

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• EmilyIsTrans@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’m not a computer graphics expert, but considering Toy Story uses ray-traced lighting I would say it at least depends on whether you have a ray-tracing capable GPU. If you don’t, probably not. I would guess you could get something at least pretty close out of a modern day game engine otherwise.

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  • pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ray tracing at 24fps is not a big ask for a modern gaming PC.

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    • EmilyIsTrans@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Maybe, what I said is mostly based on the experience I have with Blender’s Cycles renderer, which is definitely not real time.

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    • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Full raytracing (path tracing) might be.

      I think they can do it for very basic looking games like Quake 2.

      That said, I doubt you’d actually need full RT for visuals like Toy Story 1. Or indeed on most things.

      They got pretty good at faking most of it. RT can basically just be used for reflections, shadows and global illumination and most of us wouldn’t notice the difference.

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• Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Things that can affect it, with some wild estimates on how it reduces the 800kh:

  • Processors are 10-100 times faster. Divide by 100ish.
  • A common laptop CPU has 16 cores. Divide by 16.
  • GPUs and CPUs have more and faster math operations for numbers. Divide by 10.
  • RAM speeds and processor cache lines are larger and faster. Divide by 10.
  • Modern processors have more and stronger SIMD instructions. Divide by 10.
  • Ray tracing algorithms may be replaced with more efficient ones. Divide by 2.

  That brings it down to 3-4 hours I think, which can be brought to realtime by tweaking resolution.

  So it looks plausible!

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• SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  With a modern game engine and PBR shaders you can definitely get the same look as the movie. If you try to render it exactly the way they did it with a software renderer on the CPU then maybe. Their rendering software, Reyes, didn’t use raytracing or path tracing at all. You can read about it here

  graphics.pixar.com/library/Reyes/paper.pdf

  I only skimmed it but it seems what they call micro polygons is just subdivision. Which can also be done realtime with tessellation.

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• unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Modern GPUs are easily 1000x faster than the ones back then, so 800k hours would be reduced to 800h which is a month worth of time. Thats just raw compute tho, there is lots of optimization work that has happened in the last 30 years, so its probably waaay less than that. I would expect it to be possible in a few days on a single high end GPU.

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• Zomg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Fun fact: in the first Toy Story, all the kids at Andy’s birthday all have the same face as him.

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• foggy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yes and no.

  You could get away with it with lots of tricks to down sample and compress at times where even an rtx 5090 with 32GB VRAM is like 1/64th of what you’d need to do in high fidelity.

  So you could “do it” but it wouldn’t be “it”.

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• Obi@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Basically to sum it up:

  • Render the actual movie from original files, hard because of the inherent technical challenges

  • Recreate the movie, easy from a technical perspective for your machine to render, hard (potentially very hard) from an artistic and design perspective.

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• Takapapatapaka@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’d say you could render something close in real time. I’m not entirely aware of all techniques used in this film, but seeing what we can render at 60fps in terms of games, I think you could find a way of achieving a Toy Story look at 24fps. You may need a lot of tweaking though, depending on what you use (i was thinking about EEVEE, the Blender ‘real-time’ engine, and I know there are a bunch of settings and workarounds to use to get good results, and i think they may tend to make the render not real-time (like 0.5s, 1s, 2s per frame, so quite fast but not real time)

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• Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Doubtful

  I’m not talking out my ass, a good buddy of mine worked for frantic films for decades and I myself learned 3D alongside him… We would squabble over the rendering farm too…

  Anyways most of the renderers made for those early movies were custom built. And anytime you custom build, you can’t generalize to output to a different system. So it’s a long way of saying no but maybe, if you wrote a custom renderer that was specifically designed to handle the architecture of the scenes and the art and the lighting and blah blah blah

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• db2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Every time. And I don’t even drink. 🤡

  PBR bottle

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  • sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    How about Heineken?

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  • Mbourgon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I believe he’s making a joke about using PBR shaders to do so, but my knowledge of this is zero.

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    • db2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It’s a joke not everyone appreciates, but that’s ok.

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• LucidNightmare@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Kingdom Hearts 3 Toy Story world looked damn close to the original, so I’d assume maybe if work was put into it?

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