Toy Story Meets The Far Side
First a little housekeeping, and then on to todays topic. I have been off the blog for a while, but now I am back. It mostly has to do with a change of roles for me here at Sun. As I have outlined here before, much of my background over 17 years here at Sun is in the media and entertainment industry. I have just moved into a role as senior solution architect for the media and entertainment industry. That means I get to help drive Sun's strategy for this industry and help our media and entertainment customers solve their problems with our incredible collection of Sun products and services. As time goes on, I will comment on the M&E industry and how we fit in. This is going to be a lot of fun, and I look forward to sharing it.
So, let's talk about the first one. At GDC 2005, I got a lead on a really interesting animation project being done by an amazingly creative and funny guy - Steve Oedekerk. Steve has workd on a number of films (Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, Bruce Almighty) and animations (Jimmy Neutron). At the time, Steve was looking for a renderfarm to render his new movie. We went down to meet Steve and his studio to discuss the project. Well, 15 months later, we are now seeing the final result - The Barnyard. Take a look at the trailer. The best I can describe it is Toy Story meets The Far Side. And it was done on Sun. Kudos to the whole Sun team on the project and of course the whole team at Nickelodeon Movies for a great product.
Sun actually has a long history in the renderfarm business. Pixar used Sun to render the first few full length animation films they produced - Toy Story, Toy Story 2, ... The problem is that rendering a single frame of animation is a task that will max out your single threaded performance. So, while we were focused on bigger SMP throughput applications, x86 products were coming onto the market that made more sense for the renderfarm market. So, we started losing the market. Studios have always loved the reliability of Solaris, but the performance now lagged. Enter, our new x64 products.
When we started producing x64 products, we had our performance back. However, the renderfarm market needed to be convinced - and most had moved to linux. Well, we started talking to a few studios, but it is all about timing. And with The Barnyard, we made it to the right studio at the right time with the right ISV's, so they took the chance. We stepped up and proved that we could do the job. What used to take 4 weeks to render, we got down to 1 week. This gave them the production capacity to finish the film on time.
So, what is next. Well, we are talking with a bunch of studios about new projects and they all look positive. We are still working towards making it possible to do rendering on the Sun Grid, but that means getting some of these ISV's onto Solaris. It's a catch-22. ISV's don't see the demand for Solaris, and Studios can't use Solaris unless the ISV's are there. I really want to get to having Solaris back in there because of its stability and other great features, so I will continue to drive it. And allowing anyone to submit rendering jobs to the Sun Grid without building a renderfarm is a completely natural fit.
We are also seeing studios thinking about moving to 64 bit, but it is an all or nothing proposition. The whole production pipeline has to move or none of it. Otherwise you get image artifacts. It will happen soon though because of the limitations of memory in a 32 bit environment. The amount of complexity and data needed to render a single frame of these films is staggering. Maybe that will become a topic for another blog - programmable shading in the animation production pipeline. On the whole, the renderfarm business is getting nothing but more interesting.
In a future blog I will discuss the high level architecture of renderfarms and why the exploding density of compute units and storage are creating new architectural challenges. Until then, remember, "What happens In The Barn, stays in The Barn."
Posted at 08:52PM Apr 26, 2006 by dtwilleager in General |