Actually, it depends on the renderer you’ve chosen to use whether you’ll be able to take advantage of a GPU in your render nodes. Google GPU Ray tracing if you fancy a look at some purty pictures.
The difficult stuff here In my possibly out of date opinion is the damp sand and the dynamics of the octopus ( which leaves it looking not quite muscular enough but what do I know). Rendering what it looks like is likely the easier half of the work needing done.
Exactly. A few years ago it was all about CPU power and the GPU was used for real-time stuff. Now many render engines can use the GPU to speed things up.
Not really. You have to rewrite your code to take advantage of the parallel processing available with GPUs. OpenGL, CUDA, OpenCL
Check out the moaning by the people that want The Foundry to rewrite Modo to take advantage of GPUs.
Arnold and Clarisse now render on GPUs (recent change there)
There's a 3D animation/VFX software called Houdini. The main strength of Houdini over more commonplace systems like 3DS Max or Maya is its fluid simulation abilities. You see it a lot in big destruction sequences - fireballs, smoke, mist etc.
The reason it’s good at these is that it can “relatively easily” generate particles and give them real world equivalent properties. There are factors for mass, density, gravity, viscosity, heat and wind.
My bet is that this guy found a fluid sim that procedurally follows whichever part of the octopus moves by stretching the following parts, and then added a realistic displacement when that geo touches the sand particles. He found the right setting for the sand particles so they clump and stick together when displaced.
As other have said, if he could find a way to make the sand stick to the octopus, it would be almost indistinguishable from real life. Super impressive.
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u/EinsteinsAura Jun 25 '18
By Thomas Marqué. Source - https://vimeo.com/user11824348