Slashdot Mirror
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."
nope. heck i got thru hi skool wit out lernen hows to reed or rite.
of course sometimes it is just easier to write something up and not worry too much about spelling or punctuation. it is the sentiment that matters, plus you obviously knew which version the author intended to use in the post.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
It depends on which part of the production world you're talking about...
For rendering, you need raw CPU power and middle of the road networking. A rack of dual proc PCs and a 100BaseT switch is plenty for most 3D people.
For 3D modeling, a good graphics card and a strong PC behind it is what's needed. You want a card that can handle the polygons, can handle the textures, and has enough cache for all of the display lists. A 3DLabs Wildcat-series card on a modern PC is good enough for almost any 3D animator. And will be faster than all but the fastest SGI.
For compositing, you really do need the big iron. There is no PC out there that can handle 3+ streams of HD at the same time, let alone layer them, adjust the colors, add effects, etc. in real time. This can be done without much sweat on an big modern SGI running IFX Piranha or Discreet Inferno. The big catch is RAM and the RAID performance. 8 GB of ram is a good start and a sustained 500+ MB/sec coming off your multiple channels of fibrechannel is a must.
Don't get compositing confused with "painting". Painting is where you take one frame of a movie and touch it up with paint tools (Amazon Paint, FilmGIMP, etc) then flip thru the other frames noting any needed changes. This can be done on Mom's Pentium 3.
There are, of course, cheaper solutions that don't work as well... but for some folks, that may be good enough. Shake on a Mac, Linux box, or low end SGI does a good job. So does Combustion on a modern wintel PC. It's *can* work with HD, but you need patience and realistic expectations. It's not realtime in any way, by any stretch of the imagination.
So yeah... there are lots of machines to choose from, and many tools for many jobs. If the Shuttle could hold a real gfx card (Wildcat 7210, for example) it would be a 3D modeler's dream. With the ATI 9700, it's only for games or light use of Maya and friends.
You also have to keep in mind what gets bought with the money. A $2M SGI usually includes lots of RAID hardware... and a machine that can handle 100s (often 750+) sustained MB/sec without problems. It's required to do the heavy lifting jobs.
Also note that SGI doesn't sell "Render Farms". Big SGI gear is usually used to support one task... generally compositing, somtimes multiple projector realtime 3D work (such as a six-sided reality CAVE). The spare CPU cycles are sometimes used to render in the background.... but rarely is SGI hardware used to render when a cheap PC cluster can do it faster anyway. It'd be like trying to enter a F1 race with your Kenworth 18 wheeler.
There are also SGI workstations like the O2 and Octane... they used to be used for 3D modeling and low-res realtime work. Still used by many studios, and even broadcasters. Still very popular for the weather maps on the local news for for drawing the yellow "virtual first down line" on live football games. Not heavy work, but there are some gotchas involved. The stability is handy there.