Papers by Dana Batali


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Multiresolution Radiosity Caching for Efficient Preview and Final Quality Global Illumination in Movies

Per H. Christensen, George Harker, Jonathan Shade, Brenden Schubert, Dana Batali
July 2012

We present a multiresolution radiosity caching method that allows global illumination to be computed efficiently in a single pass in complex CG movie production scenes.

For distribution ray tracing in production scenes, the bottleneck is the time spent evaluating complex shaders at the ray hit points. We speed up this shader ... [more]

Additional materials: [globillum.m4v], [siggraphslides.pdf], [siggraphtalk.pdf], [subsurf.m4v]

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #12-06


Ray Tracing for the Movie 'Cars'

Per H. Christensen, Julian Fong, David M. Laur, Dana Batali
September 2006

This paper describes how we extended Pixar's RenderMan renderer with ray tracing abilities. In order to ray trace highly complex scenes we use multiresolution geometry and texture caches, and use ray differentials to determine the appropriate resolution. With this method we are able to efficiently ray trace scenes with much more geometry and ... [more]

Available in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing 2006, pages 1-6. IEEE 2006


An Irradiance Atlas for Global Illumination in Complex Production Scenes

Per H. Christensen, Dana Batali
June 2004

We introduce a tiled 3D MIP map representation of global illumination data. The representation is an adaptive sparse octree with a "brick" at each octree node; each brick consists of 8 cubed voxels with sparse irradiance values. The representation is designed to enable efficient caching. Combined with ... [more]

Published as pp. 133-141 in the Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2004, Eurographics/ACM, June 2004.


Ray Differentials and Multiresolution Geometry Caching for Distribution Ray Tracing in Complex Scenes

Per H. Christensen, David M. Laur, Julian Fong, Wayne L. Wooten, Dana Batali
September 2003

When rendering only directly visible objects, ray tracing a few levels of specular reflection from large, low curvatures surfaces, and ray tracing shadows from point-like light sources, the accessed geometry is coherent and a geometry cache performs well. But in many other cases, ... [more]

Published as pp. pp. 543-552 in Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2003 Conference Proceedings), Blackwell Publishers, September 2003.


RenderMan, Theory and Practice

Dana Batali, Byron Bashforth, Chris Bernardi, Per H. Christensen, David M. Laur, Christophe Hery, Guido Quaroni, Erin Tomson, Thomas Jordan, Wayne L. Wooten
July 2003

Siggraph 2003 course notes.