"No picnic will ever be the same again," says the advertisement for the new movie Antz. "No computer-generated full-length feature film will ever be the same again," says Vaughan Wooler, MD of Silicon Graphics sub-Saharan Africa, referring to the creative and technological advances achieved in the making of this film.
When Dream Works/Pacific Data Images (PDI) decided to undertake this mammoth project, they took on an army of Silicon Graphics machines on which to produce it. 166 Silicon Graphics desktop systems and 270 Silicon Graphics servers were manned by 160 people to create the second-ever completely computer generated full-length feature film.
Some fascinating behind-the-scenes statistics regarding the production of Antz are:
There are 119,592 frames in the film
The entire movie was rendered approximately 15 times during production
Roughly 33 meters of approved animation were produced per week
275, 000 hours per week was spent on rendering
The average size of individual frames rendered was 6 MB
Total number of Silicon Graphics processors used for rendering was 700
Number of years/days/hours/minutes it would have taken to render this film on one processor: 54 years, 222 days, 15 minutes, 36 seconds.
Amount of storage required for the film was 3.2 TB (3.2 Trillion Bytes)
75, 000 frames were kept online at any given time
The Silicon Graphics` O2 desktop workstation`s capabilities of modelling, animation and lighting were used to create the film`s breakthrough visual effects, such as the human-like facial movements and realistic water imagery. Origin200 servers provided the compute power necessary to render the entire film, including the visually complex ant colony and large crowd scenes.
"PDI has set a new standard for computer-generated films with the production of Antz and Silicon Graphics is proud to have been part of its creation," adds Vaughan Wooler. "The integrated Silicon Graphics desktop and server systems ran continuously without any hitches. This exceptional reliability and performance, was critical to the production process."
The 270 dual-CPU Origin200 servers and 160 Silicon Graphics O2 workstations provided Dream Works/PDI with the server production capacity and online storage required to manage and manipulate the vast amounts of data being generated. The end-to-end Silicon Graphics technology allowed PDI to control the cost of production by reducing systems administration costs and leveraging hardware resources.
By using a total of over 700 processors for rendering, PDI animators were able to produce approximately 33 meters (107 feet) of approved animation each week. Animators used multipurpose O2 workstations on the desktop for 3D animation, allowing them to play back rendered animation frames and increase productivity. Two large Origin2000 servers were used to serve all of the render data to the animators` desktop machines.
Silicon Graphics is the leading supplier of computer systems for the production of digital special effects to the entertainment industry. All the top studios use Silicon Graphics workstations and servers to generate many of today`s visually breathtaking effects for blockbuster feature films.
Share