Otoy wants to democratize the development of extremely complex 3D graphics animations by moving the whole process to the cloud. Judging from demos that the company showed today at Nvidia’s technology conference, Otoy is making good progress.

Josh Trank (pictured right, in the middle), director of Fantastic Four, appeared on stage during the keynote speech of Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang at the GPU Technology conference in San José, Calif. Trank touted how his special effects team will be able to tap cloud-rendering technology from Otoy to create the movie at a much lower cost.

Otoy uses software such as its Octane Render to allow people to create complex 3D scenes by tapping the computing power of the cloud. The graphic artist doesn’t need a workstation with high-end hardware. Instead, he can use as many cloud graphics processors as needed for a short time and pay for that usage.

It’s like Otoy gives people the ability to create a digital movie or a video game in the cloud and then rent the computing time needed to bring the creation to life.

“It’s elastic, and you render what you need,” said Jules Urbach, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Otoy, in a subsequent talk after the keynote speech. The tools can be used by big-budget movie makers such as Trank or indie game companies that can’t build their own server farms to render their 3D animations.

Otoy’s technology and tools — Octane Render for films and Brigade for games — allow a creator to craft a 3D image in the cloud, visualize it, and then push it out to production. It can be used to create high-end images, such as human faces with realistic skin and wrinkles. And artists don’t have to wait days for the work to be done. Otoy will provide the technology to do tasks, such as raytracing, in real-time.

“You will see major game developers building with it,” Urbach said. “Directors can tell their stories more interactively, more quickly. As a result, we should get better movies. It’s now available as a service, so anyone with the chops can tell a story in 3D.”

To use Otoy, animators download a small app from Otoy that allows them to work on project from any computer or — perhaps in the future — any mobile device. They’ll no longer have to go to an office.

Otoy works with off-the-shelf technology. Nvidia will provide the hardware and grid computing software for the data centers that will render the imagery. Nvidia launched on Tuesday its Grid Visual Computing Appliance, a specialized server for cloud-based applications such as Otoy’s. Trank said that the tools enable easier film creation, and Urbach said that the graphics solutions from Nvidia can render images 40 times to 100 times faster than on a central processing unit.

Huang noted that computer graphics is now standard in Hollywood. The tiger in the Oscar-winning Life of Pi is in the movie for 80 percent of the movie, but it was rarely filmed. The tiger (pictured top) was mostly made with computer animations by a group called Rhythm and Hues. The tiger has 10 million hairs, all rendered, and it took several hundred million hours of CPU time to create.

Otoy launched Octane Render in November and has now begun to publicize the service more widely. Tens of thousands of artists are now using Octane. The price is $199. Otoy has made an alliance with Autodesk on the product, and its tools can be integrated as a plugin for almost all the major 3D art tools on the market today.

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The democratization of 3D image rendering is nigh.

OTOY, a cloud-based technologies company, released its Octane Render software today. OTOY designed Octane as a rendering tool to work with common off-the-shelf graphics processors — like the kind from AMD and Nvidia that most people already have in their home workstation PCs. While cloud computing can disrupt many local industries by bringing Silicon Valley power to remote locations, OTOY is using its research to squeeze more power out of the computer sitting on your desk.

“Octane Render enables movie quality rendering on any budget,” OTOY chief executive officer Jules Urbach told GamesBeat. “The terrific  work done by the students and independent artists using Octane Render on their laptops and desktops speaks to that. None of the gains we see today would have been  viable on consumer GPUs prior to 2010. This is why Octane Render is so much faster than CPU-based rendering systems. It was designed from the ground up to tap into the massive  – and cheap — computational and rendering power on recent consumer GPUs.”

Octane operates as a plug-in with popular 3D modeling and artistry software like Maya, Poser, and 3D Studio Max. OTOY promises results equal to anything coming out of Hollywood but at a drastically reduced cost and in much less time.

This tech offers the artist an “unbiased” rendering engine. That basically means it can perfectly reproduce lighting. This allows for real-time changes to exposure, depth of field, and other effects.

“Bottom line, with Octane Render, it is now possible to render a photorealistic scene at 1080p in seconds with an off the shelf $350 video game card,” said Urbach. “The quality is no different — in fact, it is perhaps even better — than what comes out of a  cluster of high-end CPU render nodes rendering movie frames for a $200 million studio production.”

For the last year and a half, OTOY has had 45,000 artists working with Octane as part of an extended beta. The final product is available now for $199. Urbach pointed out the difference in price between this and something like Maxwell Render, which costs $1,000 and is slower than OTOY’s solution.

“For the independent artist – Octane can be used as a standalone tool, or it can be leveraged  as an integrated plugin in almost all the major 3D  art tools on the market today, including:  AutoCAD, Autodesk 3DS Max, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Softimage, Smith Micro Poser, Daz Studio, Newtek LightWave and Maxon Cinema 4D  – with more to follow in 2013,” said Urbach.

OTOY will offer free licenses for Octane Render to properly accredited educational institutions.

In the first quarter of 2013, the Los Angeles-based firm will announce four more plug-ins.

OTOY is also licensing an Octane Render software development kit to game developers and visual effects studios. This will allow those teams to implement this fast and efficient rendering solution into their custom software.

“Obviously, we’ve seen lots of interest from visual effects houses and movie studios that are eager to cut their render costs by 1/40 to 1/100 when they switch over to consumer GPUs with a solution like this one,” said Urbach. “Now that we’ve launched, that process can begin in earnest. We’ve also seen video game developers begin building next-gen game content around the Octane SDK in order to roll out cloud gaming titles in a few years time that look no different than real life.”

The technology could speed up the creation process for a number of existing studios, but it could also further drop the barrier of entry for small developers who can’t afford more expensive licenses for render farms. The greatest cost in developing games is the time that coders and designers are on the clock, and Octane Render could take a significant chunk out of that.

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Filmmakers and game creators would love to create animations so realistic that they look like they were produced inside a Star Trek Holodeck, the virtual simulator from the sci-fi TV and film series. In the Holodeck, you couldn’t tell whether what you were seeing was real or was just a computer animation.

We’re not there yet. But the folks at Otoy — including some of the best computer film animators and graphics experts in the world — believe they’ve taken the first step toward the Holodeck. And it’s all part of a plan to democratize game and film development so just about anybody can create outstanding animations.

A big vision for cloud films and games

Otoy’s team has created cloud-based animation tools that can create hyper-realistic imagery like the pictures in this story, which are stills from Otoy animations. And they will put this technology in the hands of people who could otherwise never afford such special effects. These technologies can be used to create imagery that accurately creates lighting in an animated scene without requiring a huge amount of supercomputing power or programming know-how.

Otoy uses a combination of server technology and a user’s own computer to calculate 3D graphics scenes that look spectacular. The Los Angeles-based company believes that future game consoles will use this kind of web-based technology to deliver outstanding game experiences to users. Otoy won’t make these consoles itself, but its potential partners could do so and license Otoy’s technology.

“Our view is that next-generation cloud and console games, where there is a graphics chip on the client, will go down this path,” said Jules Urbach, chief executive of Otoy, in an interview. “We want to make this available to a broad range of artists and developers.”

For example, indie filmmakers and game creators will have access to cloud rendering technology that was only available to big-budget filmmakers before. Sometimes, even the big-budget movies don’t use these lighting technologies because it takes too long to render. Urbach said the scene in this link, for instance, is so hard to do that most big-budget films skip this effect, known as caustic lensing (where light intensifies on the wood after bending through the glass).

Otoy has built a cloud-based rendering technology that uses powerful graphics chips inside servers in a data center to create highly realistic images. Those images are built with a graphics technology known as “ray tracing,” where a 3D scene is calculated by sending out virtual “rays” from a single point of view. If the rays collide into an object, they bounce back and reveal the limits of how far a ray of light can penetrate into the scene.

Even more complex than ray tracing is path tracing, where rays are used to create every pixel in a scene. Otoy’s tools can be used to render extremely realistic “path tracing” scenes for modern video games or films.

The product rollout

Otoy will roll out four different tools this year and next for game developers and filmmakers. For consumers, the result will be some eye-popping special effects and animations delivered at a low cost.

“The developer tools are part of a broader platform we are building,” Urbach said.

The tools include Octane Render for film animators (here’s an example of a student project). Octane Render has been in the works for 18 months with 10,000 beta test users and it will be live by the end of the year. The technology includes the first “spectrally correct graphics processing unit path tracer,” said Urbach. That means it can be used to animations where it feels like you’re looking at photos. Octane Render will likely be available for under $300.

Meanwhile, Otoy will also launch Brigade, the first path tracer for rendering games which can create imagery in real time but not quite at the level of quality needed for films. Developed by Bikker in 2010, Brigade will enable game developers to make much more realistic games with scenes where it feels like you’re walking around inside a photo where the scenery and characters look real, Urbach said. If there are flaws in the image because your graphics chip in your PC can’t keep up with the demands of the image, then Otoy’s cloud technology will detect that and send down the data that is needed for the image at a high speed.

“If there is noise in the path tracing, we can patch that with the streaming technology,” Urbach said.

The Otoy SDK will also include a WebCL compiler, a portable super-fast OpenCl-based cloud service for Intel, Nvidia, ARM and Advanced Micro Devices hardware. The WebCL software can run cool imagery in a web browser without the need for a plug-in. That means that users won’t have to download huge files just to be able to view path-traced films or games on the web.

Building a brain trust

Otoy enlisted some top talent in graphics technology to create the tools. Rendering experts Terrence Vergauwen and Jacco Bikker worked with Otoy chief scientist Rob Wyatt and noted animator Paul Debevec. Wyatt hinted at the technology when he spoke at our GamesBeat 2011 conference, where he noted that high-end graphics will be viewable on any kind of device, not just high-end game consoles.

“You write games for this platform and play on any device, anywhere,” Wyatt told the GamesBeat 2011 audience. “We can do Pixar-quality games in real time. We could play anything from Tetris to Uncharted. As long as it can decode a stream, we can play it on that device.”

If Otoy’s technology works, then the game consoles may never see another generation of new hardware, Wyatt said. You could buy a smart, connected TV with a game controller and use that to play streamed games on the TV, without a console. Console makers can adapt to the cloud or become obsolete, he said.

Otoy also plans to include its LightStage capture software, which allows developers to capture someone’s face and create an accurate computer model of it, in the Otoy SDK. That technology was used to create film effects in films like Avatar, Tron Legacy and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. LightStage was started in 2008 by Debevec and Tim Hawkins as a subsidiary of Otoy. The LightStage team won an Academy Award for LightStage’s use in Benjamin Button, Avatar and Spider-man 2 and 3. Now LightStage is used in almost every film with computer-generated actors. Otoy will include LightStage in its SDK next year, which will enable indie filmmakers to get access to the same technology via off-the-shelf equipment. Over time, Otoy wants to make it simple to include LightStage effects in any game or film, Urbach said.

Otoy has 25 employees. Urbach declined to comment on whether the company has raised money.

The road to deployment

Once all of these technologies are out in the market and become commonplace in games and movies, then Otoy will be on its way to developing a true Star Trek Holodeck. Debevec has already begun research on what a display (link to PDF) for such a Holodeck would be like. The approach is doable, Urbach said, but it’s not necessarily cost-effective now. At some point in the future, it could be.

To make these technologies widely accessible to developers and consumers, Otoy will first have to roll out its own network of servers in the North American region. Urbach says that will happen later this year and that Urbach has a large partner to help it do that.

Both Octane Render, which Vergauwen has spearheaded, and Brigade have been in development for more than two years. Both are deeply integrated into Otoy’s streaming technology and are part of Otoy’s software development kit. Otoy will sell the Octane Render product as a tool for developers once it is ready.

There are still some challenges Otoy has to overcome. It has to complete the developer tools, launch a network of servers across North America, and find ways for larger numbers of users to use that network. Once it does that, more and more developers will be attracted to using the Otoy tools. If those developers make full use of Otoy’s cloud service, it will be a success and Otoy will be on its way. Cloud-based game consoles could emerge that use the Otoy technology at some point in the future, bringing the Otoy technology to the masses of game players. But Otoy will have to accomplish all that in the face of competition from OnLive, Gaikai Electronic Arts, Valve, and GameStop.

OnLive in particular has a considerable head start in signing up consumers for its cloud-gaming service. While Otoy uses the cloud in a similar way to OnLive, Otoy isn’t planning to directly challenge OnLive in a subscriber-based game streaming business, because Otoy’s customers will be game developers, not consumers. But it’s still possible that Otoy’s partners could challenge OnLive.

Where Otoy has an advantage is in the software it has created. It has tapped some of the best graphics experts to create software tools that can render realistic scenes without a lot of computing power. The software taps the ability of graphics chips to do non-graphics computations through software such as Nvidia’s CUDA programming environment or OpenCL.

What the tools can do

The cloud renderer can handle tasks that once took days to do, such as the rendering equation created by Microsoft researcher James Kajiya in the 1980s. What once took days to render can now be done in real-time on a single 2009-era graphics chip. One of the technologies that the cloud technology can handle is ray tracing.

The Otoy Brigade solution running on a single graphics chip can process a billion rays per second. Each additional graphics chip adds another 1 billion rays per second of rendering power for calculating scenes. The content creators can render their physically correct ray-traced scenes on either the client or the server, or both in tandem.

If a user’s system has a powerful graphics chip, then Otoy’s 3D scene player, the ORBX codec, can create the scene as needed. But if the scene is too sophisticated, then the server kicks in and compensates for the weakness of the user’s computer. If the client machine can’t download a 3D scene fast enough to play its smoothly, then the server does all the work and sends a two-dimensional video displaying the scene to the user’s machine. Thus, even users with relatively weak hardware can view sophisticated cloud-rendered scenes and therefore view cool animated films or play games with outstanding graphics.

Octane and Brigade are unique compared to other path tracers because of their speed and quality while rendering in real-time. Both can handle path tracing at 60 frames per second on a single graphics chip, as shown in this video. Wyatt, who worked on the original Xbox and the PlayStation 3 as well as lots of games created by Insomniac, is the architect of the Otoy render technology. Otoy is adapting several other rendering solutions that are appropriate for other markets and other uses of path tracing.

Check out a couple more cloud-rendered images below. They look like photos, but they are all computer-generated animations built with the Otoy technology. Among the artists whose work is displayed here is Cornel Swoboda.

This house was rendered via Otoy’s Octane Render beta tool.

This fake woodpecker was created with the Octane Render tool.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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