Digital Content Creation on SunGrid
When I was in college, I knew I wanted to work for Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). They were doing amazing things with computer graphics. They had just done the famous stained glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes. All of us CG geeks would ooh and aah at the wonder. I did my ray tracer and knew I was going to work in film effects. Well, I actually came to work for Sun. But I never lost my passion for the film industry.
So, why do I write about this? There are a couple of reasons. Obviously the hype machine for Star Wars Episode III has got me. I have read the novel and just finished the “making of” book. Episode III has about 85 minutes of completely computer generated images. And last week I was down in southern California visiting an animation studio looking for rendering services. Jonathan has repeatedly used movie rendering as an obvious candidate for SunGrid. There are many studios that could the SunGrid for this purpose, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. While there will always be big name movies and movie studios using render farms, the real value of SunGrid for these types of applications are all of the other users.
There are many other people creating digital content which require batch processing. There are many independent film makers (check out iFilm). There are people creating batch rendered scientific visualizations. There are all the hobbyists. All of these folks don't have the resources to create a state of the art render farm – but that doesn't mean they don't need access to one. Hello SunGrid.
To bring this back to the games world, there are many many examples of batch processing where SunGrid can help today. There is batch rendering of cut scenes. Normal map generation for high quality bump mapping. Radiosity calculations for diffuse inter reflections. And even pre-calculated visibility calculations for use in real time rendering. All of these uses could use a world class compute farm, and SunGrid can do it.
The rise of independent digital content started when the tools to create the content became affordable and available to the mass market. Look at the explosion of personal video editing tools that are now available. There are many good 3D content creation tools that are now close to if not completely free. The thing that is missing is the ability to create sophisticated content – which requires large compute farms. For the mast 20 years, there has been one constant in 3D batch rendering. A single frame in a scene on average takes an hour to render, with the most complicated being 24 hours. The time is the same, but the frame complexity has exploded. Check out the opening sequence of Episode III.
SunGrid brings a world class render farm to the masses, for between $1 and $24 a frame, depending upon the complexity of the frame. Maybe it's time to start Renderman hacking again.
Posted at 09:26PM Apr 19, 2005 by dtwilleager in General | Comments[0]