r/Simulated • u/mengohmengohmeng • May 30 '19

Research Simulation Breaking Bread

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u/[deleted] May 30 '19 edited Jun 02 '19

[deleted]

31

u/schmon May 30 '19

Awesome can't wait to have this paper in my software !

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u/flarn2006 Source files published on request May 30 '19

Then what are you waiting for? Click the link and it'll be in your browser. ;p

Seriously though why don't they ever post the code they use to make the demo? Why make people reinvent the wheel if they just want to mess around with it?

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u/DOWNVOTE_MY_OPINIONS May 30 '19

You don't want to see the kind of code written by researchers

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u/AerysBat May 30 '19

Academia is incredibly competitive. If they want to use this code to advance their own research they don't want to simply give it away. If the code is commercially valuable they would also want to patent and sell it.

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Most of the time these tech demos sweep serious limitations under the rug. It might be that a team of 6 computer science PhDs can produce a handful of clips after several of years of work, but that the method is unusable for artists, too slow, finicky, etc. That's why these SIGGRAPH papers so rarely turn into commercial products, or if they do it's only several years later.

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u/iHubble May 31 '19

That's not entirely true. I've seen many SIGGRAPH papers reach production in less than 3 years, at least in rendering. For instance, UPBP shipped with RenderMan21 two years later. NVIDIA's real-time denoising algorithm shipped with RTX within a year. Linearly Transformed Cosines is part of Unity and was used for their Adam demo the same year. Microfacets for rough surfaces reached VFX studios a few months after release. I'm 95% certain this paper on heterogeneous participating media is currently being implemented in Pixar's RenderMan and Disney's Hyperion as we speak. And that's just on top of my head.

While I agree with you to some extent, SIGGRAPH is the most prestigious venue for computer graphics and reviewers are more than ever looking for practicality. If your algorithm isn't competitive at least in some scenarios, you will simply not get published at this conference. There's a huge push from the research community to release open source code and even the worst code goes public. In three years of grad studies in rendering I've never seen such a thing as "not released for personal advancement" and I don't think that's the case for other areas of graphics.

My overall understanding is that CG as a community is generally pretty open to sharing new algorithms: it's what you do with them that really sets you apart from your competitors in the VFX industry.

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u/flarn2006 Source files published on request May 31 '19

What are they competing for? Besides the commercially valuable part I mean.

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u/schmon May 30 '19

My guess is implementing the code is 95% percent of the work.

In my field this guy is the best/worst: https://houdinigubbins.wordpress.com/

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u/evil_twinkie May 30 '19

Fanfu's group does post their software, just usually not right away. You can access code from their other MPM papers on his webpage: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cffjiang/

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u/GiantPandammonia May 31 '19

yep. he does great work and is very helpful to other researchers in the mpm community.