Accelerate Rendering with AI

June 30, 2017. Santa Barbara .The full article.

Disney Research, Pixar Animation Studios and UCSB accelerate rendering with AI

Researchers from Disney Research, Pixar Animation Studios, and the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed a new technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning that eliminates this noise and thereby enables production-quality rendering at much faster speeds.

Specifically, the team used millions of examples from the Pixar film Finding Dory to train a deep learning model known as a Convolutional Neural Network. Through this process, the system learned to transform the noisy images into noise-free images that resemble those computed with significantly more light rays. Once trained, the system was successfully able to remove the noise on test images from entirely different films, such as Pixar's latest release, "Cars 3," and their upcoming feature "Coco," even though they had completely different styles and color palettes