M V Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 There was a great little documentary on MSNBC about Pixar last night so I was checking out their website. I just read that a single frame of a Pixar movie can take 6 hours to render and some frames have taken as long as 90 hours! This is seriously blowing my mind right now. I just can't even imagine the complexity of a scene to take that long on Pixar's render farm. Im doing the math in my head and a 90 minute movie at 24 fps would take over 777,000 hours to render! I can only assume there are hundreds of frames rendering at a time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 They have render farms made up of thousand of high end machines, and they are working on many different films at one time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyberstyle Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 I did an animation course with Andrew Gordon from Pixar, and he was saying that the 'average' render time for one of their movies is 6 months, and the average frame was 8 hours. Considering the size of the render farm they have, that is some seriously huge computing going on. I remember his comments on the waterfall scene from "Cars" too. They were half way through rendering and "OH, F##K". The entire system crashed throughout the company and they then realised they needed to upgrade everything to 64bit, or the movie would never be finished. - Imagine the fun of calling up Dell and saying "I'd like to buy 25 thousand Blade servers, and 1500 workstations please..........and we need them next week". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Camby1298 Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 Pixar/Renderman uses some primitive technology and algorithyms compared to the Arch Vis feild. When Cars came out they were raving about how they just developed Raytracing for the reflections on the cars. Ooooh! Im not putting down Pixar, but many Vfx firms use older software and havent bothered looking into whats new and up coming. Since their budgets are literally 10s of millions of dollars, they can get away with such long render times. Another reason why they dont look into newer developed shaders, is because their thought is "if aint broke, why fix it?" with their awesome history, and great work why change up now? I remember reading frame times for Pirates of the Carribian 2. Many of the frames, where it contain Davy Jones and/or his crew a single frame would take over 48 hours to complete. It seems long frame times are common in the Vfx feild.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 true they have long rendertimes, but take a look at the level of detail they go to. I remeamber watching an interview with on of the IT guys from Dreamworks, who was happily taking a tour around their render farm. When asked what their IT budget was , he answered, "What budget?, if we need it we get it". In the backround there was a stack of Dells, waiting for ,"Just in case we need more power". jhv Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 It's pretty sick when you think about how much time they spend working on one 60 second scene, I mean sure it looks great but so would anything you spend every day for 6 months messing with. There was a time I wished I was one of those guy's but from what I've read they don't get treated very well unless your one of the top talents and most of them are unemployed after the movie they are working on wraps up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 I subscribe to DLF (Digital Labour Force) here is OZ, basically is job posting for the CG industry. Its interesting to see the the types of jobs being posted and from that see which compaies are gearing up for big projects. If your a top notch Python scripter you will never be out of a job Remeamber a short while back there was a story about (I could be wrong here) ILM doing a big arch Viz animaton. They were patting themselves on the back that it too ages for a team of 150 people to pull this together. or something like that. What I do remeamber was the backlash the archViz community had against that article. Can anyone else remeambe that article? jhv Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jinsley Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 I subscribe to DLF (Digital Labour Force) here is OZ, basically is job posting for the CG industry. Its interesting to see the the types of jobs being posted and from that see which compaies are gearing up for big projects. If your a top notch Python scripter you will never be out of a job Remeamber a short while back there was a story about (I could be wrong here) ILM doing a big arch Viz animaton. They were patting themselves on the back that it too ages for a team of 150 people to pull this together. or something like that. What I do remeamber was the backlash the archViz community had against that article. Can anyone else remeambe that article? jhv I do remember that... just looked for it and can't seem to find it again. I wonder what they would say looking at what is being produced lately, like MIR, etc... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 If I am remembering correctly it wasn't a news article but someone posted a link to the article. It was a SFX focused web magazine. jhv Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BVI Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 At one point (last year) I believe, Pixar was flagged as a national threat by the CIA as they have more computing power (in raw CPU's) than any other US organisation, bar NASA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M V Posted August 20, 2010 Author Share Posted August 20, 2010 I guess I was naive. I thought that these studios had sick render times. Here I am watching Cars and thinking to myself, they seriously must click render and get a 1 min animation in a few seconds. I would have never thought that stuff being produced at this level would take months and months to render. In regards to Renderman being out of date, I think thats what Pixar is kinda looking for. When I watch a Pixar movie, its like being transported to a world of plasticy fantasy or something. Its not realistic in the Arch Viz sense, but its 'something else'. Thats their brand and I dont think its an ignorance about "if it aint broke..." I think this is what they are and who they are and thats that. If you have a chance to see it on a re-run, I highly recommend watching the Pixar story on CNBC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M V Posted August 20, 2010 Author Share Posted August 20, 2010 I've always wondered, what resolution are these films rendered at? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyanSpaulding Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 I think Pixar being a bit behind has everything to do with their talent's proficiency in Maya and Renderman, not because they don't know. They develop Renderman with new tools as needed, not worrying about keeping up with everyone else, so that they aren't changing tools on their artists, which could lead to significan delays in multi-million dollar projects. Thus, it's better to spend an assload on hardware, than retrain talent and/or end up with delays in movies due to unfamiliar new technology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erickdt Posted August 20, 2010 Share Posted August 20, 2010 I've always wondered, what resolution are these films rendered at? I heard somewhere that IMAX frames render out at 4000px wide which is not terribly big when you think about it. I would imagine regular sized, non IMAX movies would be smaller. E Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jophus14 Posted August 23, 2010 Share Posted August 23, 2010 This is a link to a couple of pictures of their render farm. What a beast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted August 23, 2010 Share Posted August 23, 2010 (edited) Remeamber a short while back there was a story about (I could be wrong here) ILM doing a big arch Viz animaton. They were patting themselves on the back that it too ages for a team of 150 people to pull this together. or something like that. What I do remeamber was the backlash the archViz community had against that article. Can anyone else remeambe that article? The studio was Sony Pictures Imageworks, the budget for the animation is rumored to be around the 1.5 million range. The uproar was mostly due to the Director defining a new paradigm of arch-vis movie, or something like that. http://www.fxguide.com/article466.html -Nils Edited August 23, 2010 by NilsN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Thomas Posted August 23, 2010 Share Posted August 23, 2010 I had a feeling it was going to be the Chicago Spire anim We did the stills for that project and I can guarantee our fee wasn't in the same ballpark! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hockley91 Posted August 23, 2010 Share Posted August 23, 2010 Here's some information I read about on ILM's render farm: ILM’s render farm has 5700 core processors, the newest of which are dual processor and quad cores (eight cores per blade), with up to 32 GB of memory per blade. In addition, the render farm can access the 2000 core processors in the artists’ workstations, which ups the total core processors to 7700. As for data storage, the studio’s data center currently has 500 TB online. Transformers 2 sucked up 154 TB, more than seven times the 20 TB needed for 2007’s Transformers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted August 23, 2010 Share Posted August 23, 2010 The studio was Sony Pictures Imageworks, the budget for the animation is rumored to be around the 1.5 million range. The uproar was mostly due to the Director defining a new paradigm of arch-vis movie, or something like that. http://www.fxguide.com/article466.html -Nils Thats the one, thanks, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kippu Posted August 24, 2010 Share Posted August 24, 2010 my wife works in one of these studios and hearing her render times , i am so happy with my puny system churning out presentation renders in couple of hours , but then on the other hand i am not zooming in on the dog's mouth to see the drool and fur and what not in detail Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BVI Posted August 24, 2010 Share Posted August 24, 2010 What’s really amazing is that everything is done in-frame as they don't like to composite. There is a fantastic write up here: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5819&page=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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