iMac Pro iMac Pro Films

[jujoje]

Hadn't seen this on the front page and thought y'all might be interested

https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/films/

At the moment the web sites not playing for me (good job marketing). But you can see the films and breakdowns on their youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHFlHpPjgk72-DBBxHI1H2ZR2X4y0-bQc

Pretty cool, particularly as a fair few of them are using 3D apps (Maya, Houdini, Modo, C4D).

 

[bxs]

Cool visuals.... thanks for sharing.

 

[anticipate]

I do love how in the fine print it says they used equipment besides the iMac Pro for portions of the rendering

 

[jujoje]

That's pretty much expected though; for final frames, you're pretty much always going to be rendering on a farm for this kind of work (3d/motion graphics in particular).

There was a reddit thread on the films which was full of people arguing that it wasn't a pro machine, because additional equipment was required, which made me realise that most people have no idea about how you would use the machine in a professional workflow. This is totally not directed at you (as I'm assuming your not really serious) but it makes understanding the benefits and drawbacks of using a iMac Pro for work difficult, as much of the discussion is dominated by people confidently arguing about things they have no clue about. Anyways, rant over

Also, I was pretty surprised that Apple emphasised the 3D side with this series of films, and pretty cool, for me, to see Houdini featured so much. One related thing is that the tech preview for Octane 2018 showed octane running on Metal, both on a Mac and on an iPad. They claimed that they were getting similar performance to CUDA. You can see the video here: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=66014 Octane is my least favourite renderer, but looks like Apple are actually taking these things seriously, not just saying they are...

 

[anticipate]

That's pretty much expected though; for final frames, you're pretty much always going to be rendering on a farm for this kind of work (3d/motion graphics in particular).

There was a reddit thread on the films which was full of people arguing that it wasn't a pro machine, because additional equipment was required, which made me realise that most people have no idea about how you would use the machine in a professional workflow. This is totally not directed at you (as I'm assuming your not really serious) but it makes understanding the benefits and drawbacks of using a iMac Pro for work difficult, as much of the discussion is dominated by people confidently arguing about things they have no clue about. Anyways, rant over

Also, I was pretty surprised that Apple emphasised the 3D side with this series of films, and pretty cool, for me, to see Houdini featured so much. One related thing is that the tech preview for Octane 2018 showed octane running on Metal, both on a Mac and on an iPad. They claimed that they were getting similar performance to CUDA. You can see the video here: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=66014 Octane is my least favourite renderer, but looks like Apple are actually taking these things seriously, not just saying they are...

Yes I know; I thought it was funny and I knew the internets would get in a jumble over it. I know it would be a waste of time to render such complex things on the iMac itself (unless you're a very small shop and have no choice; it would take a long time but be doable if you had such time...).

I too am surprised they focused so heavily on 3D. It reminds me of the Apple of old, which is nice.

 

[jujoje]

The comments are going to be hilarious when they finally launch the new Mac Pro and it's not a insanely specced behemoth people imagined.

Funnily enough I worked at small shop when the original 27" iMacs came out. Not having a render farm at the time we kicked off renders locally overnight. Those machine were not designed for that at all; the heat caused the CD drives to warp and break and in one case the front panel of the screen fell off. Good times

Hopefully Apple follow through on their 3d push at wwdc (and offer more help to 3D companies to get stuff working). You never know with Apple though, they seem to suffer a bit from ADD with their focus (although not as bad as google...).