Tippett to invest in SGI servers and workstations for Cats & Dogs movieAmsterdam 17 September 2001 Tippett Studio, in Berkeley California, recently created more than 60 3D animated shots for the Warner Bros. movie Cats & Dogs and over 150 3D shots, plus 15 CGI creatures, for Evolution from DreamWorks SKG. To complete the work, it recently invested in 10 Silicon Graphics Octane2 Irix-based visual workstations, 25 230 and 330 workstations running Windows NT and Linux, an SGI 2100 high performance visualisation server and two terabytes of storage to add to its existing SGI hardware.
"This was the first time we had Irix, Linux and Windows NT workstations all working on the same production", claimed Eric Leven, Tippett Studio's CG supervisor on Evolution. "We started with a large number of Silicon Graphics O2 workstations and a render farm made up primarily of SGI Origin 200 servers. Later we added a smaller number of dual-processor Octane2 workstations and, for the first time in the shop, we began using Windows NT and Linux operating systems running on Silicon Graphics 230 and 330 visual workstations."
"Compositors used 10 Linux OS-based machines from SGI with 20 processors to run Nothing Real's Shake and additional processors to run Pixar's RenderMan", Mr. Leven continued. "The animators used the Silicon Graphics 230 workstations, and we found that those boxes gave us the best performance from Alias|Wavefront Maya on Windows NT. The technical director, the paint artists and the modellers used Maya and Alias StudioPaint software on the Irix O2 and Octane2 workstations. Then everything was networked together and rendered on SGI servers."
For the 15 new creatures in Evolution, maquettes were sculpted and scanned into O2 and Octane2 visual workstations using a 3D laser scanner. The digitised creatures were then refined and manipulated by animation.
According to Mr. Leven, "From the very beginning of pre-production to the last shot was about 11 months, which was a crazy schedule. I think we were averaging about six shots every week for the entire duration of production. It was absolutely the shortest schedule we ever worked on."
Ad Emmen |
 |