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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."
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.
Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
...my webserver has been doing realtime CGI for years.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
We have Real-time CGI Porn?
Where ever you go, there you are.
Maybe it IS realtime, but the actors just don't have the skill to watch themselves on a monitor WHILE acting, so they use the obvious 'i'll watch when i'm done method'
"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.
In the Fellowship of the Ring DVD, Peter jackson can clearly be seen watching golum on a monitor (low poligon, but golum none the less) performing the mo-cap Andy Serkis is performing IN REAL TIME; as it is happening (not after).
So does this make this old news??
I dunno, I feel the ILM have been behind the bleeding edge for sometime now...
alnya
Its a pitty they haven't got one of those to write the script!
Steve.
well, I guess they need to get that jar jar binks death scene juuuuust right.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
The realtime images aren't -final- renders of the scene. They're just rough drafts. The scene still has to be rendered in full res/texture, which still takes hours per frame.
What ILM has is a supercharged 'preview' button. Just like when you switch to wireframe mode in Lightwave or Maya and see a 'realtime' preview of the animation you're working on. But I'm sure ILM's version looks little bit better.
D
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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!
would be to develop a program that re-writes Lucas's inane dialogue in real time...
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.
SGI laughed at the unassuming threat of the video chipsets, thinking that they would never be as fast as brute force. Even Pixar thought the same. Boy, were they wrong though. You can set up a cheap-ass render farm for about $250k, taking up minimal space that can do the same job as a SGI render farm that costs a cool $2 million (Shuttle SFF PC w/ 3 gig CPU + ATI 9700). Of course, there's still the software side.
The Nvidia's GeForceFX and ATI's Radeon 9800 both contain features that even through the marketing-hype has some real value to programmers out there. Just look at Doom 3. It will run well on some computers that are just 6 months old. Now, imagine taking 250 of them, as a Beowulf cluster!!1
Post your server's url to slashdot, and we'll see just how realtime it is.
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.
Dark Helmet - "What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?"
Col Sandurz - "Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now."
Dark Helmet - "What happened to then?"
Col Sandurz - "We passed then?"
Dark Helmet - "When?"
Col Sandurz - "Just now. We're at now, now."
Dark Helmet - "Go back to then."
Col Sandurz - "When?"
Dark Helmet - "Now."
Col Sandurz - "Now?"
Dark Helmet - "Now."
Col Sandurz - "I can't."
Dark Helmet - "Why?"
Col Sandurz - "We missed it."
Dark Helmet - "When?"
Col Sandurz - "Just now."
Dark Helmet - "When will then be now?"
Col Sandurz - "Soon."
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Now that's Cost Savings!
You need to be able to render something in realtime, combining rendered scenes and a live video feed, and then to display that on a monitor or writing it out to digital storage - and all in real time.
This is not a function of the CPU of the GFX card - they both play a part, but not as much as you seem to assume.
The main thing here is *bandwidth*. You have to have a large amount of non-contentious bandwidth to chuck all that data around.
Point to point bandwidth between multiple devices - CPU to memory, CPU to GFX, GFX to memory, CPU to output pipe, input pipe to GFX, etc. etc.
One approach was UMA, which SGI pioneered in the O2. A 7year old SGI O2, even a low end one, can handle 800mb textures in realtime with ease. There is little available today that can even approach that.
Another approach is some sort of IO switch. SGI have the crossbar in the Octane/Octane2, which is old tech based on the IO infrastructure of the Origin 2000.
The Octane's crossbar switch gives you a large amount of non-contentious bandwith, which is why, for instance, a low end 195mhz SGI Octane from 1998 can apply in incoming digital feed as a texture to an object, and display that on digital output, in real time.
Remember the Anubis warriors in The Mummy Returns? Their skin was a texture from a feed that was applied in real time - this was so the animators could get a good feel for how their animation changes effected the scene.
Sun have a similar sort of setup with their UPA crossbar on their Ultrasparc kit. IBM and DEC^W^Compaq^WHP a similar deal.
The reason UNIX vendors can charge lots for their kit is the years of R&D they've put into solving problems like this, which just don't appear on low end commodity kit.
The Origin2000 can scale to 1024 CPUs in a single system image - it's one OS, no partitions. Sure, that's for a niche market, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a serious IO contention issue that needs to be solved in that scenario. SGI have then taken that solution and thrown it into their graphics workstations.
CPU speed and gfx speed will not help here - neither will the OS. Linux or Windows, ATI or Nvidia, PC solutions will not cut it in this area - the underlying architecture is poorly suited to those sorts of tasks.
Niche markets for people like SGI will always remain small, but despite the ill-informed nay sayers, they will never die - because there is a need there, and there is no commodity kit that can do the job.