Sony Imageworks’ implementation of the Arnold renderer is a fork of the commercial product of the same name, which has evolved independently since around 2009. This article focuses on the design choices that are unique to this version and have tailored the renderer to the specific requirements of film rendering at our studio. We detail our approach to subdivision surface tessellation, hair rendering, sampling, and variance reduction techniques, as well as a description of our open source texturing and shading language components. We also discuss some ideas we once implemented but have since discarded to highlight the evolution of the software over the years.

Abstract We present an approach to articulated figure motion in which motion tasks are defined in terms of goals and ratings. The agents are dynamically‐controlled robots whose behaviour is determined by robotic controller programs. The controller programs for the robots are evaluated at each time step to yield torque values which drive the dynamic simulation of the motion. We use the AI technique of genetic programming (GP) to automatically derive control programs for the agents which achieve the goals. This type of motion specification is an alternative to key framing which allows a highly automated, learning‐based approach to generation of motion. This method of motion control is very general (it can be applied to any type of motion), yet it allows for specifications of the types of specific motion which are desired for a high quality animation. We show that complex, specific, physically plausible and aesthetically appealing motion can be generated using these methods.

Abstract Until recently, sound has been given little attention in computer graphics and related domains of computer animation and virtual environments, although sounds which are properly synchronized to motion provide a great deal of information about events in the environment. Sounds are often not properly synchronized because the sounds and the phenomena that caused the sounds are not considered in an integrated way. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to motion and sound as it applies to computer animation and virtual environments. The key to this approach is synchronization by mapping the motion parameters to sound parameters so that the sound changes as a result of changes in the motion. This is done by representing sounds using a technique for functional composition analogous to the ‘shade trees’ which we calltimbre trees.These timbre trees are used as a part of a sound description language that is analogous to scene description languages such as RenderMan. Using this methodology, we have produced convincing sound effects for a wide variety of animated scenes including the automatic generation of background music.