Design and implementation of modern production renderers

Over the past decade, production rendering has moved from primarily using Reyes-based algorithms to being based on path tracing and physically based approaches. The developers of five of the most significant production renderers have each recently written comprehensive systems papers on their renderers, describing the challenges of modern production rendering and the systems they have respectively built to solve them. In May 2018, these papers were published in a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics. In this panel, the developers of these renderers will go into depth on how the challenges of production rendering have influenced the systems they've built and how they have developed new techniques to make path tracing viable in practice. These systems are remarkably varied in some of their core design decisions; the panelists will also compare and contrast their own design decisions with respect to topics like precomputation versus runtime computation, RGB versus spectral rendering, and out-of-core rendering versus requiring scene geometry to fit into memory.