RandomControl is a Spanish company located in Madrid specializing on rendering solutions using nVidia CUDA technology. Between their portfolio belongs rendering solutions such as fryrender (physically-based light simulator) and Arion (hybrid-accelerated and physically-based light simulator). Moreover both fryrender and Arion have a wide range support for the most used 3D applications on the market and are physically-basedunbiased render solutions. We were asking questions Erwan Loison about the background of RandomControls as well their products and their plans for the future. We would like to thank RandomControl one more time for finding time for us.
Also, a while ago we were reviewing the new version of Arion 1.6.0 and if you are interested you can read here our thoughts about this fabulous renderer. At the bottom is a small gallery highlighting the final results which you can achieve when you use RandomControls products.
Q: How long is RandomControl on the market? Who founded RandomControl and why was the company establish?
A: Randomcontrol was established in the fall of 2008. It previously was named "Feversoft", which was the original developer of fryrender. Due to a split in the two main activities of the old company, RandomControl was created by Chema Guerra to focus on CGI software exclusively.
Q: How looks a typical day by RandomControl?
A: Well that's one tough question to answer. A typical day starts by some coffee and reading the emails of the (short) night, taking feedback from our testers around the world and checking what happened in the CGI industry. After that moment of calm, it's all about coding and and testing until the day ends.
Q: How big is the team which work on Arion?
A : There are actually 3 people working on Arion. As stated in the credits of our products, there's one engine developer, one main technical tester, and one plugins coder.
Q: How long you were developing Arion before the first release?
A : Arion had been in development for a very long time, as a pet project. During 2007, we had been doing some initial tests of realtime raytracing on the CPU but of course that was too slow to be released. At the end of 2008, we made our first shy implementation of our raytracing routines in CUDA, realizing that maybe there was something to do here, but the hardware was still too young and weak to develop a fully-fledged product.
One year and a half later we had a real breakthrough with the arrival of the Geforces 2xx (mostly the 285 with 2GB of memory) where our prototype was running at a really surprising speed (more or less equivalent to a quad-core CPU, without optimizations). At that moment we decided to commit to the development of Arion, simply because it was worth it. To this date we have never regretted it :)
Q: What unique Technologies use Arion?
A : A very unique characteristic of our company is that we only use in-house developed code and libraries. Except for the classic open source libraries used for jpg, png, tiff and zip I/O, all the rest is proprietary technology. We call the compendium of all our codebase "RCSDK", which we may start to license at some point in the future.
In the 3D area of our codebase, our raytracing acceleration structures are quite unique in the world and so far we have not found another implementation that can deliver that speed.
But probably the heart of the technology, the thing that really makes a difference in the rendered image, what changes everything and is completely novel is our BRDF model.
It is 100% energy conservative at any roughness level or any combination of material settings, which is a goal never reached before by any of the public papers about bidirectional reflectance functions. We are very proud of it because it is a mathematical achievement in many regards which simplifies and drives many decisions in other areas of the rendering core. It is also capable of rendering frosted dielectrics and SSS at a fantastic speed, which is something we're happy with.
Q: While Arion is optimized for nVidia CUDA technology, how it performance with AMD technology?
A : It's simply not supported. There is no such thing as 'AMD technology' in fact. OpenCL is a joint venture from many actors in the industry, but in our opinion it is not as mature as CUDA. The fact that NVIDIA is developing the software and the hardware together is a big advantage to get the most out of both. In the early stages of development of Arion we tried both technologies (CUDA and OpenCL) and opted for CUDA in the end.