Comment Along with all the other good reasons,... (Score 1) 345
mentioned such as model security, predictability, bandwidth needs, texture transfer, and so forth, another good reason is that different computers render images differently. An image from and AMD processor looks different from a frame from a Pentium which looks different from something rendered on a Mac. Color correcting individual shots pretty much needs to be done anyway. But color correcting on a frame by frame basis is just ridiculous.
And from an end user point of view you'd probably get a lot of boring frames anyway. Any large complex scene isn't rendered as one large complex scene. It's rendered as layers. That's what lets you actually render things without frying your computer. One layer would have Shrek on it. One would have Shrek's shadow on it. One would have Shrek's specular highlights on it. One would have Shrek's ambient shading on it. One would have reflections of Shrek in the environment. And that's if you're lucky enough to be rendering frames involving a main character and not some background element.
The real thing to do would be for a small studio or animator to write themselves a render virus that does the whole distrubuted rendering thing without telling the end user. Then use that on projects that have a less strict schedule so that if you're frames don't match up color-wise or a large group of people clean the virus off you have time to do things over.
In general the quality of computers and the public in whole aren't reliable for projects. That's why there are animation studios at all instead of just asking the random passerby to draw you a frame for your movie.
-James
www.arcsecond.net
And from an end user point of view you'd probably get a lot of boring frames anyway. Any large complex scene isn't rendered as one large complex scene. It's rendered as layers. That's what lets you actually render things without frying your computer. One layer would have Shrek on it. One would have Shrek's shadow on it. One would have Shrek's specular highlights on it. One would have Shrek's ambient shading on it. One would have reflections of Shrek in the environment. And that's if you're lucky enough to be rendering frames involving a main character and not some background element.
The real thing to do would be for a small studio or animator to write themselves a render virus that does the whole distrubuted rendering thing without telling the end user. Then use that on projects that have a less strict schedule so that if you're frames don't match up color-wise or a large group of people clean the virus off you have time to do things over.
In general the quality of computers and the public in whole aren't reliable for projects. That's why there are animation studios at all instead of just asking the random passerby to draw you a frame for your movie.
-James
www.arcsecond.net
