Rasterizing Volumes and Surfaces for Crowds on Soul

In order to produce shots with hundreds of multi-volume crowd characters for Soul, we could not rely on the same I/O heavy pose-cache pipeline used for the hero characters [Coleman et al. 2020]. Our rendering and systems teams rated the total necessary storage for the ”soul world” at over 100 TBs for an average of two hero characters per shot.1 For expansive crowds of these characters to hit the same volumetric look while avoiding this I/O limitation, two new render-time technologies were developed. The first leveraged an existing volume rasterizer to pose volumes at render-time, informed by a lattice deformation. The second allowed for rasterization of surface primvars to be delivered to the volume shaders.