Chapter 92: Developing the Compression Renderer

After discussing external troubles, let us turn to internal ones.

There are official subsidies at home as well, but unfortunately they all go to the production companies.

The special effects industry can only feel honored to be included, while its own pockets remain thin.

Beyond this, the larger reason lies with the producers themselves.

To put it in the words of people in the field, cutting time, adding work, and raising neither price nor pay has become the norm.

Take this as an example: the two sides agree that materials will be delivered in March and the finished work in September.

During that period, the special effects company has to free up all its production staff and devote them entirely to the project.

The producers often deliver materials late, but the delivery date is tied to the film’s promotional and release schedule and will not be pushed back.

In the end, only the special effects company is squeezed. Time is shortened, the price stays the same, and costs rise, leaving many special effects houses increasingly unable to survive as things go on.

The final payment is another huge problem. Even years ago, the remaining balance on domestic television special effects contracts was often treated as a gift to the client, and very few special effects companies were able to collect it back.

These unwritten rules of the industry further compress the living space of special effects companies.

...

And that is not all. Some of the gray-money dealings in the film and television world, where producers and directors profit from budgets, can also swallow up part of the special effects fee.

The money that should be spent, and the money that should not, is burned through before the film even wraps. A special effects company originally promised twenty million for post-production may find that only ten million remain by the end.

Materials arrive late, the early footage is poorly shot, and the post-production house is left to clean up the mess.

Doing extra work is not the issue, but when special effects companies ask producers for more money, they are often told the budget is gone: help us out, brother, and we will come back to you on the next film with compensation.

By the time the next film really comes, the same thing happens all over again.

This is the current state of the domestic special effects industry: there is no high degree of industrialization, no mature production system.

Special effects companies have less time to work, heavier workloads, and no extra pay to show for it, so of course they end up looking bitter and hard-pressed.

...

What leaves many domestic special effects workers most helpless is that whether projects flow abroad or more competitors enter the field, these are normal market behaviors, nothing to complain about.

But domestic producers are often willing to spend more of the budget on traffic-driving stars, while constantly squeezing special effects costs.

The domestic level is indeed a little lacking, but it is by no means the so-called bargain-bin effects people mock online.

The truth is simply that reality does not allow better effects to be made.

Time is tight, money is scarce, and everyone still has families to feed. No one can survive on passion alone.

...

Aside from the top few special effects companies in the country, whose circumstances are slightly better, the smaller firms all live in a very difficult environment.

More often than not, they merely participate in projects led by the big companies and earn a modest share of the funds.

The country is already the world’s second-largest film market, and in the foreseeable future it will continue to grow.

Countless film and television companies will keep gathering here, gradually making it the center of the market, while also a low-cost basin.

In such an environment, to put it simply, the country truly possesses the objective conditions to become a global center for film special effects production.

Yet on the one hand the special effects industry develops in an irregular way, and on the other hand there is a severe shortage of talent.

Whether this opportunity can be seized and the industry brought to maturity still requires the subjective effort of many companies.

...

Lu Yu had once felt pity for the domestic special effects industry too, and like many others, had mocked its poor level.

Only after fully understanding these realities did he realize how one-sided his previous view had been.

To put it plainly, this is not merely a special effects problem, but a problem of the entire domestic film and television industry.

The producer is king, capital is father, and everyone else is just a younger brother, depending on the client’s mercy for a meal.

Want to make money effortlessly while standing upright?

No such thing.

There is simply no soil for that here.

The last time Chen Xiaofei said he wanted to set up a film and television company, Lu Yu had even joked that the waters in that circle ran deep.

He had not expected them to be merely deep; they were practically a swamp.

...

And Lu Yu had no intention of stepping into that swamp.

The special effects software was merely a whim, born from his wish to fulfill a promise to another civilization.

He was already planning to leave the acquired special effects company to grow on its own; how could he be expected to cultivate it in depth?

Still, leaving it to its own devices did not mean leaving it completely alone. When control was needed, it still had to be exercised.

For example, there was the renderer he had once promised Chen Xiaofei.

Lu Yu planned to add the compression algorithm he had finished earlier into the company’s newly developed renderer, so that the time required to render materials could be cut down effectively.

With this compressed renderer, no matter how difficult things became for special effects companies, they would still be able to secure a decent space to survive.

He had no intention of open-sourcing this compressed renderer.

He was not foolish. If he open-sourced it now, the domestic special effects industry would likely develop only to face even harsher external competition.

After obtaining the renderer’s source code from Ge Yuncong, he left the company with the security personnel.

...

Back home, Lu Yu turned on the computer, adjusted the programming environment, and began reviewing the renderer’s source code in full.

Actually, when speaking of renderers, one cannot avoid mentioning the Arnold renderer.

In Lu Yu’s view, on Blue Star, this renderer was truly a great product that advanced rendering technology from an academic standpoint.

To put it in simple terms, many of the algorithms it developed are used by almost every renderer on Blue Star.

Lu Yu himself had also drawn inspiration from them.

How can a programmer’s business be called copying, right?

Arnold could be said to have opened an entirely new era of physically based shading in industrial application.

Although its rendering speed was relatively slow, it was mainly designed for renderers handling massive geometry and textures, large-scale production, and high-investment, first-tier film special effects.

Its defining trait was optimizing data storage to render enormous volumes of data effectively, at the cost of performance and speed.

It was precisely because Arnold was easy to use and highly stable, and especially suited to major film special effects projects, that it became the built-in renderer for Maya effects.

Since it had so many strengths, why not simply draw on them?

Was he, Lu Yu, supposed to redesign and develop everything from scratch just because he had nothing better to do?

...

The renderer developed by Cloud Han Technology could be said to combine the strengths of most renderers on the market.

It not only supported custom output, but also supported immediate rendering, defaulted to camera-distance optimization parameters, and reduced memory overhead.

Motion blur, node topology, texture caching, SSS point-cloud algorithms, ultra-fast ray tracing, a new ray-acceleration architecture, a massive polygon displacement system, and physically based material and lighting systems, and so on.

It was also highly optimized in these areas, and could be said to be more comprehensive and advanced than the renderers on the market.

Lu Yu took a quick look and felt that this renderer was already excellent enough; if released as open source, it would still hold a great advantage.

As for the renderer he would optimize next, he would leave that for Phantom Creation Digital.

His own child, naturally, ought to be fed a little better.

...

Lu Yu made a backup and began optimizing the renderer.

The quality of a renderer, in the end, is still determined by its algorithms.

Cloud Han Technology’s renderer had been programmed and developed according to Lu Yu’s ideas in the first place, and many of its algorithms were based on the general framework he had proposed.

What Lu Yu could optimize now were only some small details, with no major overall changes.

Of course, the most important thing was to add in the compression algorithm he had developed earlier.

That was the essence of the optimized renderer.

The renderer developed by Cloud Han Technology already had rendering speed no worse than anything on the market.

Now, with Lu Yu’s independently developed compression algorithm added, rendering speed would increase many times over.

That meant the same material that others would need six hours to render could be finished by Phantom Creation Digital in about one hour.

If, holding such a competitive edge, Phantom Creation Digital still could not make a name for itself in the domestic special effects industry, then Lu Yu would have no choice but to wipe away his tears and fire Ma Su, replacing the entire management team.

...

As the old saying goes, when you are programming, time always slips away unnoticed.

For four or five days in a row, Lu Yu was immersed in the world of code.

After all, although it was called a renderer and sounded fairly simple, the algorithms inside were anything but few.

Even if Lu Yu was only optimizing it, he still had to handle them one by one.

After another four days, he finally finished optimizing all the algorithms and added in the compression algorithm.

At last, he encrypted and packaged the compressed renderer several times over and stored it on a separate hard drive.

This hard drive was specially reserved for installing the renderer later, and all installed renderers were protected against copying, making them very difficult to crack.

In other words, once the compressed renderer was installed on a computer, it could only be used; no one could inspect any of the code details, nor copy it away.

Lu Yu planned to hand the hard drive and the password over to Chen Xiaofei when he had time, so that Chen Xiaofei could keep it safe and handle the later installation work.

After all, he did hold shares, and among the people Cloud Creation Technology could trust, there was only him.

...

At last finished with the compressed renderer, Lu Yu stood up and stretched his limbs.

He took a pear from the refrigerator, sat in a reclining chair by the small beach, and ate while checking the latest news on his phone.

It was already December 14, and nothing major had happened.

Yet as Lu Yu casually browsed, he came across a piece of news that stirred some feeling in him.

The report said that today, Mr. Yu Guangzhong had passed away at the age of ninety.

Most people must be quite familiar with this gentleman, surely?

Even now, people can still recite his lines without hesitation: “Homesickness is a tiny postage stamp.”

“Wine enters the hero’s heart and becomes seven parts moonlight; the remaining three parts roar into sword energy. With a flourish of embroidered lips, half the glorious Tang is revealed.”

“When your lover has changed her name to Mary, how can you send her a tune of The Southern Charm?”

From his works, one can see not only homesickness, but also a miniature of an era.

Lu Yu was not the sort of literary youth who immersed himself in art, but he still held such poets in great esteem.

He had once seen people online say that modern society is a desert for poetry.

Lu Yu did not really understand that. Poetry is, after all, merely a vessel for the many emotions of humankind.

If a poem cannot stir resonance in people’s hearts, of course it will not be noticed, much less passed down.

True poets use the simplest words to write the feelings and emotions shared by most people.

Not tortuous, obscure phrasing, lofty and inaccessible, pleasing only a few.

Modern poetry is supposed to value concision, isn’t it? Things like, “The world is so big, I want to see it,” could count as poetry too.

See? Doesn’t that go straight into people’s hearts?

So those who lament a desert are mostly just indulging in affectation.