TY - BOOK AU - Watt, Martin AU - Coumans, Erwin AU - ElKoura, George AU - Henderson, Ronald AU - Kraemer, Manuel AU - Lait, Jeff AU - Reinders, James TI - Multithreading for visual effects SN - 9781482243567 U1 - 777.7 PY - 2015/// CY - Boca Raton PB - CRC Press KW - Simultaneous multithreading processors KW - Animation KW - Cinematography KW - Computer animation KW - Parallel processing N1 - Table of Contents Introduction and Overview James Reinders Introduction Overview of Case Studies Motivation Program in Tasks, Not Threads Value of Abstraction Scaling and Vectorization Advancing Programming Languages for Parallel Programming Parallel Programming in C and C++ Data Movement and Layout Summary Additional Reading Houdini: Multithreading Existing Software Jeff Lait What Is Houdini? Rewrite or Refactor Patterns Copy on Write Dependencies OpenCL The Presto Execution System: Designing for Multithreading George ElKoura Introduction Presto Presto's Execution System User Extensions Memory Access Patterns Flexibility to Experiment Multithreading Strategies Background Execution Other Multithreading Strategies Debugging and Profiling Tools Summary LibEE: Parallel Evaluation of Character Rigs Martin Watt Introduction Motivation Specific Requirements for Character Animation Graph Threadsafety Scalability: Software Considerations Scalability: Hardware Considerations Production Considerations Threading Visualization Tool Rig Optimization Case Studies Overall Performance Results Limits of Scalability Summary Fluids: Simulation on the CPU Ronald D. Henderson Motivation Programming Models Fluid Simulation Summary Bullet Physics: Simulation with OpenCL Erwin Coumans Introduction Rewriting from Scratch Using OpenCL GPU Spatial Acceleration Structures GPU Contact Point Generation GPU Constraint Solving OpenSubdiv: Interoperating GPU Compute and Drawing Manuel Kraemer Representing Shapes The Control Cage Uniform Subdivision Serializing the Mesh Representation Transition from Multicores to Many-Cores Reducing Branching Divergence Optimization Trade-Offs Evaluating Our Progress Fundamental Limitations of Uniform Subdivision Feature Adaptive Subdivision Implementing the GPU Rendering Engine Texturing Conclusion Bibliography Index N2 - In Multithreading for Visual Effects, developers from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Side Effects, Intel, and AMD share their successes and failures in the messy real-world application area of production software. They provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and visual effects used in popular visual effects libraries (such as Bullet, OpenVDB, and OpenSubdiv), one of the industry’s leading visual effects packages (Houdini), and proprietary animation systems. This information is valuable not just to those in the visual effects arena, but also to developers of high performance software looking to increase performance of their code. Diverse Solutions to Solve Performance Problems After an introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter presents a case study that illustrates how the authors used multithreading techniques to achieve better performance. The authors discuss the problems that occurred and explain how they solved them. The case studies encompass solutions for shaving milliseconds, solutions for optimizing longer running tasks, multithreading techniques for modern CPU architectures, and massive parallelism using GPUs. Some of the case studies include open source projects so you can try out these techniques for yourself and see how well they work. https://www.routledge.com/Multithreading-for-Visual-Effects/Watt-Coumans-ElKoura-Henderson-Kraemer-Lait-Reinders/p/book/9781482243567 ER -