Gregory B Nichols

US Patent:

20130328857, Dec 12, 2013

Filed:

Jun 11, 2012

Appl. No.:

13/493902

Inventors:

Brent Burley - Monterey Park CA, US
Andrew Selle - Montrose CA, US
Christlan Eisenacher - Burbank CA, US
Gregory Nichols - North Hollywood CA, US

International Classification:

G06T 1/00

US Classification:

345418

Abstract:

A method is provided for a streaming hierarchy traversal renderer with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity that cannot fit in memory. The renderer organizes scene geometry into a spatial hierarchy, generates directional queries to be traced in the spatial hierarchy, performs a streaming hierarchy traversal over the directional queries, and uses the results of the directional queries to shade or render the scene. The traversal performs a single pass over the directional queries for splitting into one child stream of directional queries for each child node at each scene node in the hierarchy. A prioritized traversal of the hierarchy may also be carried out using various cost-metrics for optimized parallelism. The rendering may also bounce the directional queries to provide multi-pass global illumination.

US Patent:

20130328875, Dec 12, 2013

Filed:

Jun 11, 2012

Appl. No.:

13/493929

Inventors:

Brent Burley - Monterey Park CA, US
Andrew Selle - Montrose CA, US
Christian Eisenacher - Burbank CA, US
Gregory Nichols - North Hollywood CA, US

Assignee:

DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC. - Burbank CA

International Classification:

G06T 15/50

US Classification:

345426

Abstract:

A method is provided for integration cone tracing with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity requiring global illumination. Instead of using a conventional noise prone ray tracer, cones are intersected with a scene bounding hierarchy to determine intersecting scene geometry, and integration results are computed by directional sampling within the cones. As a result, the working data set may be reduced as the rendering may begin with a smaller set of cones as compared to the large number of rays required for acceptable filtering in a conventional ray tracer. Furthermore, by refining the cones during the rendering only on an as-needed basis according to an acceptable noise threshold and by sharing secondary cone bounces among primary cones, the processing workload and data set requirements may be kept to a reasonable level even for multiple global illumination passes.

US Patent:

20130329107, Dec 12, 2013

Filed:

Jun 11, 2012

Appl. No.:

13/493948

Inventors:

Brent Burley - Monterey Park CA, US
Andrew Selle - Montrose CA, US
Christian Eisenacher - Burbank CA, US
Gregory Nichols - North Hollywood CA, US

Assignee:

DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC. - Burbank CA

International Classification:

H04N 5/225

US Classification:

34833301, 34820799, 348E05024

Abstract:

A method is provided for streaming light propagation with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity requiring art directed global illumination. By attaching a data recording shader or equivalent functionality to any tracing based renderer that can provide multi-pass global illumination, the complete set of light bounce propagation records and the set of emissive samples for a particular rendering can be recorded to memory or disk. A user may edit the emissive samples to adjust the lighting environment, including modifying light source color and intensity and even moving and adding new emissive samples. To relight the scene, the edited emissive samples are processed through the propagation records using a streaming multiply-and-add operation amenable to high levels of parallelization, avoiding a costly re-rendering of the scene and providing a final quality result in interactive time.

US Patent:

20140327675, Nov 6, 2014

Filed:

Mar 19, 2014

Appl. No.:

14/219970

Inventors:

- Burbank CA, US
Christian Eisenacher - Burbank CA, US
Sean Jenkins - Sherman Oaks CA, US
Gregory Nichols - North Hollywood CA, US
Andrew Selle - Montrose CA, US
Charles Tappan - Los Angeles CA, US

Assignee:

Disney Enterprises, Inc. - Burbank CA

International Classification:

G06T 15/06
G06T 15/60
G06T 13/20

US Classification:

345426

Abstract:

There is provided a method for ray-mediated illumination control. The method includes identifying a first activation region corresponding to one of an origin and a destination of a ray, where the ray is described by a ray data associated with the ray. The method further includes identifying a second activation region corresponding to the other one of the origin and the destination of the ray, interpreting an illumination rule for the ray based on at least one of the first activation region and the second activation region, and modifying an illumination in one of the first activation region and the second activation region based on the illumination rule and the ray data.

US Patent:

20140098086, Apr 10, 2014

Filed:

Oct 12, 2012

Appl. No.:

13/651218

Inventors:

- San Diego CA, US
Christian Eisenacher - Burbank CA, US
Gregory Nichols - North Hollywood CA, US
Andrew Selle - Montrose, CA

Assignee:

Disney Enterprises, Inc. - San Diego CA

International Classification:

G06T 15/00
G06T 1/00

US Classification:

345419, 345501

Abstract:

Some aspects of the disclosure include systems and methods for grouping rays into sets according to their directions. In some cases, the rays of the directional sets may then be organized into a hierarchy according to their origins and bounding cones are generated for the hierarchy nodes. The resulting bounding cone hierarchy may be intersected with a bounding volume hierarchy or other scene hierarchy.

US Patent:

20140098122, Apr 10, 2014

Filed:

Oct 9, 2012

Appl. No.:

13/648004

Inventors:

Brent Burley - Monterrcy Park CA, US
Andrew Selle - Montrose CA, US
Christian Eisenacher - Burbank CA, US
Gregory Nichols - N. Hollywood CA, US

Assignee:

DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC. - BURBANK CA

International Classification:

G09G 5/02

US Classification:

345589

Abstract:

A method is provided for distributed element rendering with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity requiring global illumination. A persistent centralized scheduler receives shading queries that are added to a request queue, determines an assignment of the request queue to hardware resources based on a resource map, and processes the request queue according to the assignment to render frames of one or more scenes. The resource map may be built by the scheduler and indicates local scene geometry cached for each of the hardware resources. By generating a full set of camera rays at each hardware resource, global illumination shading and other rendering can proceed independently against local geometry caches for high parallelism. Redundant computations are reduced through the scheduler, which may cache frequently requested rendering results including tessellation, shading, and level of detail.