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ILM Now Capable of Realtime CGI
Sandman1971 writes "According to the Sydney Morning Herald, specialFX company ILM is now capable of doing realtime CGI, allowing actors and directors to see rough CGI immediately after a scene is filmed. Actors on the latest Star Wars film watch instant replays of their battles with CG characters. ILM CTO Cliff Plumer attributes this amazing leap to the increase in processing power and a migration from using Silicon Graphics RISC-Unix workstations to Intel-based Dell systems running Linux."
Well, how can the ACTOR look at the scene WHILE he is playing it, without looking like he is looking at a scene. Also the director is propably more concentrated on the screenplay.
"Realtime CGI in Movie Quality" would be impressive, but:
"It's not at full resolution, but at least it gives them something to work with rather than working completely blind after each take."
With all the excitement over ILM using Linux I'm wondering exactly how many Hollywood visual effects studios use Linux.
The way that is worded, it makes it sound as if the processing power of an Intel/Linux combination is superior - whereas it is a matter of the bang for the buck instead.
You can get more processing power with the latter since it is cheaper (I would imagine even moreso with AMD) and easier to maintain. But not because it is inherently special or faster in any way.
I wonder if this will bring Silicon Graphics back into the favor of Intel boxes - for awhile they were okay with WinNT and Intel boxes, but then they dropped all of that - presumably for a higher profit margin and less hassle of maintaining multiple systems (also likely some break in business politics - perhaps someone at MS pissed someone off at SGI).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Perhaps they're using Geforce FX's + the new hardware renderer in Maya 5. It sends geometry, shaders and lighting to the card for rendering, saving the finished frames to disk. This results in far faster rendering than making the CPU (not specialized for 3D operations) do all the work. Something like *twenty times* faster give or take, depending on the scene's complexity. Cool stuff here, people!
I always thought with the current 3d cards coming
:)
out and the horsepower they can throw at things
they would eventually be able to to tv quality
3d animation programs in real time.
Hopefully this is going to lead to alot more 3d
animated series on tv in the near future , and
in time pick up from where final fantasy left
off. I still think it was such a pity that film
didn't get the people into the cinema to watch it.
But I think the advances they made will pave the
way for the future. Mainstream 3d Anime here we
come
It's hard to tell if this is anything more than a toy at this point. Marginal quality control is now possible. The time from pre-production to release might be a few days difference.
The actors might be able to play their roles slightly better if they know what the final result will be. In movies like EpisodeII they were acting totally blind in front of a screen for most of the movie. Very little of it was actually built.
The biggest question is "When will we have it at home?"
Well, as more and more cgi houses move off of SGI (and on to whatever), they are only really left with their server business. It's really a shame to see a once proud pioneer in the industry reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves, though I guess in this industry, its very common (e.g. DEC, Lotus, Compaq, etc). At this rate it's hard to even see them being around in 4 years, a definite takeover target.
/. comment:
ob
SGI (aka Silicon Graphics Inc.) was found dead today at the age of 20. After being a high flyer in his youth, often seen hobnobbing with Hollywoods power elite, the latter years were not so kind and saw him in the throes of an identity crisis. Eventually his reliance on a small circle of friends was his undoing, as he was slowly replaced by more mainstream competitors. He will be sorely missed, as while he was at the top, he was a role model for "cool" in the industry, and helped to usher in one of the most exciting (and abused) technology shifts in the motion picture/video entertainment industry since the advent of talkies and color.
not even close
further proof that commodity hardware is killing innovative companies like SGI, and a FREE UNIX is helping it happen.
Linux is great for a company like ILM which is stuffed full of coders who can adapt it to suit their needs, not so good for many other companies.
That was classic intercourse!
This is, largely, nonsense.
These images are *not* realtime! A PC is not capable of rendering a CGI screen, in realtime, and merging that, in realtime, with a video feed, and then displaying that, in *realtime*.
Say what you like about Linux, or high speed CPUs, or XXX vendor's high end GFX card - the architecture and the tools are physically incapable of this.
If you look at the extras on the LOTR:FOTR DVD set, you'll see people walking around, with a camera on a stick. This *is* displaying real time camera images, merged into a low res, non final rendered, scene of the Cave Troll fight in Moria.
A point of reference - the machine's they are using for this are SGI Octanes. Not Octane2s, but Octanes.
They did that work around, what, 3 years ago? And the Octane, at that time, was only 3-4 years old.
Can anyone show me a PC from 1997 that can manage that? Anyone?
Despite the fact that the Octane is an ancient piece of kit, there is nothing from the PC world that can match it's capabilities.
SGI have always been, and always will be, a niche player.
You would be a fool to buy expensive SGI kit for a renderfarm - buy Intel PCs with Linux. Similarly, you would be fool to try and do realtime CGI with that same kit - that's a specialist task that calls for specialist skills.
This article does not show that SGI is dying, or that they're being thrown out of the GFX workstation market.
This article *does* confirm what is widely known - the once cutting edge ILM are now many years behind people like Weta Digital.
Throwing around "Linux" and "Intel replacing SGI" sound bytes to try and get some news coverage for a dated effects house isn't going to change that.
ILM developed its proprietary file format, OpenEXR
Hmm.. i sense a trend in calling things open when they are actually closed. This is eroding the intended meaning of "Open" in front of fileformats or products.
no, I think that was wireframing. Yeah, it's true that it's still technically rendering, but not really very useful to the average person...
This is much higher res (though obviously not THAT great) rendering, which is really useful.
Read jack phelps dot net
A moden dual proc Xeon can come very very close to what an Octane was able to do in 1997. It's not the same thing, but it's close enough to do the job. Octane2 (with the right software) would be overkill, so here are the differences between a used Octane and a dual Xeon:
The Xeon is new. That means you can get a good warranty and not have to worry about using used equipment.
The wiz-bang factor. These days most SFX software runs on both IRIX and Linux. Even Apple's Shake does. So does all of the latest Linux utilities. It's "cooler" to many people to use a Linux workstation over an Octane.
The CPU. Granted, the Octane's torque came from it's architecture, not its CPU... but this alone does not make up for the raw power of those Xeons. It's like racing an 18 wheeler with a F1 race car. The 18 wheeler can haul a lot more, but the F1 race car will get you to the local Wal-Mart a lot faster. For small tasks, the Xeon will feel a lot faster.
This is why you'll still see a lot of existing Octanes, Octane2s, Onyx/Onyx2/Onyx3000 systems in use by hollywood. They work fine. But for new employees, and for replacement hardware, you'll almost certainly see a dual proc PC running Linux. There are, of course, come artists that prefer one over the other.
As for render farms, you're right. It only makes sense to use Intel or AMD. Using SGI (or Sun) big iron for rendering would be insane. The render software isn't even optimized for IRIX or the SGI Origin architecture anymore. I think the very last holdout was ILM, who still had their three huge Origin 2000s. (Running 1999 R10K 250MHz processors [about the equiv of a PIII/550]..... no wonder they find their new renderfarm to be faster.....).
You're right on the money about ILM being behind Weta (and possibly others). ILM is still a cool shop, but not as current as many of the others. Hell, ILM did most of the work for Episode 1 on SGI O2s. O2s! The O2 was an ok video editor, by no means a 3D or CPU powerhouse! I can't belive they got it done at all. There are HUGE differences between the O2 and Octane.
now many of those folks from 20yrs ago are running the 3d shops of today. Cheers to you all!
The entertainment sector was never a big business area for SGI. A very VISIBLE business area, but not a large one.
Stuff like this is inevitable. Computers get faster, so what used to be very difficult is now easy, so you can do it with commodity parts.
What used to be impossible is now difficult. That's what SGI does. They don't charge 2 million for a computer because they're snobs, they charge it because 1) That's what it costs to develop the things and 2) They solve problems that people are willing to pay $2 million to solve.
All this says is that the CGI problem has become simple enough to solve that you don't need $2 million to solve it anymore. So SGI just moves on to solving other $2 million problems that cost $50 million to solve a few years ago.
All we're seeing is one problem set fall out of SGI's target market as different problem sets fall into it.
Apparently there is not much an SGI machine can do that a PC cannot do (or other unix machine) since SGI has not posted a yearly profit since 1997!
It's amazing they still have a few dollars in the bank. They've sold some patents and sold off Cray (albeit for pennies on the dollar from what they originally paid), but to last that long is impressive in itself.
Any any rate, SGI does offer unique and unmatched products *in certain areas*...
Do you need a shared-memory supercomputer that can scale to 512 processors with the same exact kernel that runs on a desktop model? Or how about 1024 processors with a simple kernel patch? Very few people need that much IO across that many processors, but for those that do, there is no better choice.
Do you need a machine that can handle dozens of channels of 2gbit fibrechannel without breaking a sweat?
Do you have an insanely complicated set of HD video files and other material that need to be layered/composited? Does this job need to be done yesterday? Is full-resolution/full-quality realtime effects work needed? Piranha or Inferno running on an Onyx 3000 (plus gobs of ram and disk arrays on several channels) can do this for you.
Are you interested in seeing the true potential of Linux? Do you want to work with a true Itanium2/Linux supercomputer... one that is way more than a cluster? Want to see a single machine (again, not a cluster) with 64 processors and 512 GB of RAM? Yes, Linux can handle it too, because of SGI's kernel patches and hw/sw architecture.
Not many people need or can afford SGI big iron... but for those that do, nothing beats the SGI Origin and it's baby cousin, the Altix.