Large Scale Geometric Visibility Culling on Brave

Zachary Repasky, Patrick Schork, Kevin McNamara, Susan Fong

Abstract:

Disney/Pixar's Brave is visually complex, containing fully clothed and articulated crowds characters, a forest full of vegetation, ruins littered with debris, and a full fledged castle. In fact, it is so complex that our previous methods to remove unnecessary geometry are no longer adequate in keeping the renders feasible.

On prior shows, we used a low quality render to determine an object's visibility per shot. However, even a shot-level removal of the geometry limited the artist's turnaround times. To address this, we developed a new two pass algorithm that aggressively culls geometry on a per frame-level, while maintaining accurate visibility. In addition to our implementation that uses a software renderer, we developed a GPU version that allows immediate geometry removal.

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [visibilityCullingOnBrave.mov]

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #13-05