How is CGI [Computer Generated Imagery] Made? 🖥🏞 🔧Exploring Ray Tracing and CGI

TV and Movies have a ton of Computer Generated Images [CGI] to create fantasy worlds with dragons and castles, futuristic intergalactic civilizations, or historically accurate cities of 1700s Japan, such as in the recent TV show Shogun. But have you ever wondered how these CGI / Computer Generated Images are made? And how are these scenes so accurate that they fool the eye into thinking they are real. In this video, we're diving into Path Tracing, a type of Ray Tracing algorithm. We'll explore exactly how Ray Tracing is used to create accurate lighting and realistic scenes and how it uses quadrillions of calculations.

We're working on more ambitious subjects like computer architecture and graphics cards. Any contribution would greatly help make these videos.

Thank you to Cem Yuksel, a professor at the School of Computer at the University of Utah. He helped to proofread the script for inaccuracies, and his only course on computer graphics and interactive graphics was incredibly useful in researching this video.

Scanlands by Piotr Krynski
Agent 327 Barbershop by Blender Animation Studios
The Junk Shop by Alex Trevino. Original Concept by Anais Maamar

Table of Contents:
00:00 - How does CGI Computer Generated Images Work?
01:00 - How is Ray Tracing an Incredibly Difficult Problem to Solve
02:41 - How to Create a CGI Scene
05:48 - Rendering a Scene with Ray Tracing
09:09 - Lighting a Scene with Ray Tracing: Global Illumination
13:46 - Material Roughness and Bouncing Rays
16:04 - Solving Ray Tracing
19:57 - Graphics Cards and Ray Tracing Cores
22:31 - Brilliant Sponsorship
24:20 - We Love Ray Tracing in Blender
25:27 - Ray Tracing in Video Games
26:23 - Screen Space Ray Tracing

Animation: Mike Radjabov, Sherdil Davronov, Adrei Dulay
Research, Script and Editing: Teddy Tablante
Twitter: @teddytablante
Modeling: Mike Radjabov, Prakash Kakadiya
Voice Over: Phil Lee
Sound Design and mix: David Pinete
Additional Sound Design: Raúl Núñez
Supervising Sound Editor: Luis Huesca

Erratum:

Image Attribution:
Steve Jobs in 1972 Pegasus Yearbook produced by Homestead High School
Steve Jobs and Macintosh Computer from 1984 by Bernard Gotfryd
1982 Time Magazine Steve Jobs Striking it Rich
Apple II Image by Rama & Musee Bolo
Apple 3 by Bilby
Steve Jobs 2010 Image by Matt Yohe from Wikimedia

Internet References:

Wikipedia contributors. "3D Computer Graphics", " Light Transport", " Ray Casting", "Ray Tracing (graphics)", " Rendering". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Visited August 15th 2024

Textbooks and Papers
An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display by Turner Whitted, Bell Laboratories

Distributed Ray Tracing by Robert Cook, Thomas Porter, and Loren Carpenter

Physically Based Rendering by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, Greg Humphreys

Ray Tracing in One Weekend by Peter Shirley

The Rendering Equation by James T. Kajiya

#GPU #RayTracing #CGI

[BranchEducation]

We have a few potential topics for an upcoming video but can't narrow it down to one. Which would you pick? 1) How Lasers Work? 2) How Bitcoin Mining Works? 3) How Transistors Work? 4) How WiFi Works? 5) Recommend something else.
FYI- we are already planning videos on GPU Architecture, CPU Arch, Generative AI, and Quantum Computers. The problem is that each of these requires a mountain of research and script writing/ editing to get a cohesive lesson. Therefore, we try to mix in videos that still cover complex topics but have a more straightforward script. For Example, for explaining CPUs- there are just sooo many different directions and ways to write the script vs. how bitcoing mining works a little more straightforward (yet still complex) of a script.
Also, for my computer (Teddy) and the lead animator (Mike), we both use 3090ti graphics cards.

[JaredOwen]

The amount of detail in this video is astounding - well done!

[Mockermay]

It feels illegal to watch this for free

I love how contemporary your videos are. Most educational content, especially in computer science, tends to refer to outdated technology and/or use outdated figures, but you always use the state of the art that's currently available, which is very refreshing.

[LRiga]

I am always amazed by how you always manage to make extremely complicated and technical content accessible "to everyone." Thank you!

[ExploringNew]

Easily one of the best videos on YouTube

[_guber_]

Still can't believe that content of this quality exists free. Thank for your hard work❤

[atyla]

We need more of this type of educational videos on YouTube.

[jcm]

25:57 What you're describing here isn't Lumen, but Lightmass, Unreal Engine's light baking system. Lumen doesn't bake lighting, instead it dynamically samples lighting along a set of low resolution screen-space and world-space probes, then resolves the lighting stored in the probes against the actual screen geometry.

EDIT: Want to say that your visualisation of screen-space raytracing is probably the best I've ever seen, as it does an excellent job at showing the lack of information for off-screen and occluded surfaces. Whoever pitched that visualisation for the video, well done.

[issacdhan]

As a rendering artist, I really appreciate your effort to put it all together. Many don't know or understand it's an art and technique to get good rendering.

[saladamista]

Every time I see a new Branch Education video in my feed, I think: "Time to get a little smarter." I haven't even started watching the video yet, but I'm leaving this comment because I know it's always done with the highest quality. Thank you very much Branch Education!

[Tigrou]

20:09 the detail of the zoom into the 3090 GPU (GA102) is just incredible.

[Sports_In_MotionX]

Funny how I watched this video while waiting for my render to finish... Stopped my render mid video, finished the video and made adjustments in blender based on the info I got from the bid.

I now even understand the text that you get before the render starts (blender) BVH etc. This is quality content.

[fracta]

I can't imagine the amount of time to research all this and make animation about it. Amazing work as always!

[slicku.]

BranchEducation the youtube MVP, The holy bible of computer tech

[johnnysvensson]

Great video as usual!!

One small inaccuracy i noticed around 3:20 is that normally you don't simply apply a texture to your model, instead you create and apply a material that consist of several different "textures", for example the actual surface texture, a normal map, a diffuse map and a specular map. I believe it's important to distinguish between the two in order to avoid confusion.

EDIT: Back in the days of rasterization it was more common to simply apply a texture to your surface but the standard today is materials.

[rayargames]

Branch Education this is the best video you've ever made, we love you, keep it up!

[UrielCopy]

Its kinda insane the level of detail and complexity in these videos! Slick animations with extremely good sense of how to explain and teach. Brilliant, amazing stuff, and im baffled that this is free..

[Doyle]

30 years to get to a stage where Path tracing was possible, now we have a Youtuber using similar software on a High spec home PC creating us videos on how it was made possible, crazy times.

[YadraVoat]

0:12 — Excellent animations as always, but unless I'm mistaken the T-65B X-wing can only fire when the S-foils are in attack position? 😎