Ice Age film powered by Alias|Wavefront Maya software

In addition to creating the main characters, the Blue Sky Studios team relied on the powerful combination of SGI high-performance computing systems running Alias|WavefrontTM Maya flexible API programming and MEL scripting environments to model and animate human characters as well as snarling tigers, a murderous rhino couple, doom-preaching dodo birds, howling wolves and glyptodons.

They also built approximately 35 different environments and created special effects ranging from falling and melting ice and snow, to waterfalls and rapids, to gushing rivers of molten lava. Michael Travers, managing technical director at Blue Sky Studios, explained that Ice Age is a sort of "travel" movie. The effects were notoriously difficult phenomena to re-create digitally.

"Maya was a great tool for this film because the core package is top end", stated Travers. "It's solid, production-proven software that offers a full set of powerful features. Maya isn't a locked package: you can customise and tweak it. This means you can really do a lot with it, which is extremely important to us. Plus, according to Travers, MEL scripts coupled with UNIX version-control software allowed Blue Sky to automatically update files, enabling artists to always work with the most up-to-date models.

Blue Sky's animation team consisted of approximately 26 animators and 10 modellers. "We had about half the number of technical directors and animators that the other studios use. And that speaks very highly of the software", added Travers.

Blue Sky's proprietary rendering software, CGI StudioTM, was also used extensively on Ice Age, and one of the Octane MSEs was a Discreet flame workstation, which was in the production pipeline after rendering, for a large amount of touch-up and paint work.

The SGI Origin family systems were used in the research and development department to compile and write a large amount of custom software and run tests. They were also used as file servers, for sophisticated data management chores and to support various system capacities. One of Blue Sky's Silicon Graphics Onyx systems ran Discreet inferno software, and the other was used to do set dressing.

Blue Sky's technical assistants worked on more than 35 Silicon Graphics O2 workstations, performing a variety of quality assurance checks on models or animation files. "We give O2 workstations to the people that need access to all the UNIX and SGI IRIX OS-based software but don't necessarily need as high a performance as the key artists", explained Travers. Production artists who needed faster machines day-to-day worked on more than 50 Silicon Graphics Octane and 10 Silicon Graphics Octane2 visual workstations.