Path tracing in Production

The last few years have seen a decisive move of the movie making industry towards rendering using physically based methods, mostly implemented in terms of path tracing. While path tracing reached most VFX houses and animation studios at a time when a physically based approach to rendering and especially material modelling was already firmly established, the new tools brought with them a whole new balance, and many new workflows have evolved to find a new equilibrium. Letting go of instincts based on hard-learned lessons from a previous time has been challenging for some, and many different takes on a practical deployment of the new technologies have emerged. While the language and toolkit available to the technical directors keep closing the gap between lighting in the real world and the light transport simulations ran in software, an understanding of the limitations of the simulation models and a good intuition of the tradeoffs and approximations at play are of fundamental importance to make efficient use of the available resources. In this course, the novel workflows emerged during the transitions at a number of large facilities are presented to a wide audience including technical directors, artists, and researchers.