Medical Animation Trends 2020

HYBRID RENDERING

Heading into 2020 and beyond, we will be taking advantage of hybrid rendering – the processing of images through a combination of the computer’s central processing unit (CPU), and the graphics processing unit (GPU). GPU-rendering is arguably one of the largest and most exciting tech trends within the animation industry in recent years. The speed, low cost and easy accessibility mean that it can be taken advantage of instantly and has now been successfully used across many industries with reliable results. Random42 has led the industry with CPU-rendering since 2008, so adding GPU-rendering to our toolkit will open new creative avenues whilst staying reliable at the cutting edge of visual effects.

Our upgraded hardware and software will give our artists faster visual feedback from the computer. This makes it much easier and faster to work with more detailed assets and texture complexity, enhancing realism and lowering waiting times. In addition to this, GPUs contain CUDA cores that allow parallel processing and utilising more CUDA cores will give our production team much more power for animations and other computer-intensive tasks.

Maintaining this hybrid pipeline will ensure the Random42 quality will not be impacted. Meanwhile, upgrading our rendering engines will help ease the transition to a more GPU-based pipeline, while continuing to take advantage of our existing CPU resources and maximising computing power.

VIRTUAL REALITY

VR and AR have changed the way we collaborate, bringing us together to review and improve our projects in new and exciting ways. VR experiences will also be improving, with the rendering technique ray tracing producing realistic lighting effects that bring stunning photorealistic visualisations into our immersive VR. Historically, ray tracing has been limited to non-real time rendering but Nvidia RTX technology will provide us with a new set of tools for real-time rendering, speeding up workflow across VR production. Nvidia RTX technology also allows variable-rate shading – a technique that will improve our VR performance and rendering quality by applying more GPU-rendering power to the more complex areas of an image, and less power to the simpler areas.