This is an overview of the new rough layout pipeline at Sony Pictures Imageworks. In a notable departure from the legacy pipeline, sequence and shot-based work now begin in Unreal Engine. By exporting USD data out of Unreal Engine to share with other DCCs, we were able to reinvent the early stages of feature film production.
This talk will present some of the software testing methodologies used within the back-end divisions (rendering, shading etc) of Sony Pictures Imageworks. A key focus will be the renderingtestsuite, an image-based testing system. We will delve into its evolution, and discuss the challenges of large-scale image-based testing.
We propose a new hybrid method for efficiently sampling many lights on a scene that combines a simplified spatial tree with a resampling stage. Building on previous methods that work with a split or cut of the light tree, we introduce the idea of probabilistic splitting to eliminate noise boundaries. This yields a subset of lights that is then reduced to a smaller and bounded set for full light/BSDF evaluation and resampling. Our main contribution is the stochastic splitting formulation combined with a reservoir set technique which limits samples to an arbitrary number to avoid variable size collections.
Join artists from Sony Pictures Imageworks for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." This session will focus on the artistic and technological innovations the production has developed for this much-anticipated follow-up to the Oscar®-winning "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." Miles Morales returns for the next chapter of the Oscar®-winning Spider-Verse saga, "Spider-Man: Across the Spider- Verse." After reuniting with Gwen Stacy, Brooklyn's full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is catapulted across the Multiverse, where he encounters a team of Spider-People charged with protecting its very existence. But when the heroes clash on how to handle a new threat, Miles finds himself pitted against the other Spiders and must redefine what it means to be a hero so he can save the people he loves most.
The city of ‘Chronopolis’ served as the setting for the entire 3rd act of the movie ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’. As Kang’s stronghold, Chronopolis is a futuristic metropolis that blends functional, militaristic fortification with disordered, gravity-defying sprawl. Surrounded on all sides by wormholes that serve as access points to other worlds, it became a unique technical and creative challenge. SPI was tasked with building this environment in a way that could convey the vastness of the landscape whilst simultaneously enabling it to be shared with various other studios around the globe. This required various novel and creative solutions for both the primary look and build of the main city as well as the broader landscape of sprawl, concentric roads and wormholes. This talk will outline some of the interesting challenges of production from various SPI departments along with detailing many of the more interesting solutions to this challenge.
