SGI News
Vanguard Animation Completes Space Chimps on Time and on Budget With SGI Render Management Solution
"We purchased the SGI systems for the really big shots, the really big sequences that required massive memory and very high throughput. With the Altix servers we were able to achieve those shots and sequences in a matter of hours rather than a matter of days," said
Vanguard developed a proprietary real-time lighting tool for the Space Chimps project that enabled CG artists to place and locate lights within a scene, which in turn gave them a real-time Renderman environment response, allowing them to work with 90 percent of what the final rendered image would ultimately become.
"Artists were able to use our custom-written lighting tool to pull together scenes and shots, add lights with the art director over their shoulder, and then position them so the key lights and the reflections off of the eyes were all well-placed, and in a very expedient fashion," said co- producer
PipelineFX's Qube! uses a central supervisor backed by a MySQL database to manage the queuing and execution of the jobs on the render farm. Qube! software running on all the render farm 'worker' machines, allowed Vanguard to prioritize all the jobs in the queue, while maximizing throughput for the whole farm. The SGI Workflow-Ready Solution for Render Management integrated with and enhanced the performance of the Qube! scheduling and render farm management software.
Space Chimps, an irreverent and comedic adventure starring three chimps that boldly go where no man has gone before, is the latest project from producer and Vanguard CEO
"Both Curtis and I were working in CG at the start of computer animation, when SGI was the de facto hardware manufacturer," added Jacomb. "It was very pleasing to go back to SGI because they have been so much a part of CG animation history."
Through Seven Group (7gdm.com),
"When Vanguard came to us last year, after several months of production, they had reached the point where they knew they didn't have enough horsepower to render out all the images in the timeframe allotted," said
"SGI's innovation in computer animation continues with our powerful, affordable Altix XE servers that have certainly proved their robustness on the production of this major motion picture," said
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