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Weta Prepares to Render LOTR: ROTK
Dee Arsmith writes "Peter Jackson's special-effects company Weta Digital has just taken delivery of 588 IBM blade servers, each with two 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors. Seven racks of IBM blade servers have been added to Weta's existing 15-rack server cluster to make up the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world with more than 2000 linked processors. The cluster will be used to render the frames drawn by the animators to complete the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King."
Not sure -- but probably not.
It's more likely that they want to do more COMPLEX shots in the same amount of time it used to take to do a simpler version of the same shot.
Think about it this way -- it took the same amount of time to create Toy Story as it did to create Monsters, Inc. (roughly).
But, Toy Story doesn't spend a whole lot of time dealing with difficult to render stuff like fur. Sully walks into the scene on the other hand, watch the rendering have to keep pace with all that hair.
The trick isn't really to get it to photorealistic real-time, anyhow, for what Hollywood needs. The trick is to balance the following things:
1. Renderable in a decent time frame (e.g. a couple hours to render a 10-minute or so scene). The main point here is to get it rendering quick enough that (a) you can fix bugs and (b) you can fix bugs in time to meet the deadlines.
2. Ramp the quality as high as it can go.
In all honesty, Hollywood won't give us realtime photorealistic rendering. That's being left to the gaming computer companies so we have to wait another 5-10 years.
Why? Hollywood just doesn't need it. They can render the scene or tape it from live actors, either way they have to go in and someone has to play editor to fit all the pieces together anyways.
Watching the LOTR moview requires some background from the books in order to fully appreciate what is going on in various scenes.
One comparison would be having to stop and explain the concept of god in the movie Bruce Almighty. A large number of people in the U.S.A. are familiar with the concept of god. This means the makers of a movie that have god as a participant would rely on the background people have learned over their lives. They would not need to explain what god is.
In the LOTR movies there is a vast cosmology that in some basic ways differes from our current world. If you know nothing of this cosmology then the movies may or may not be appealing to you based on the limited comprehesion and incorrect assumptions you will make due to you not possessing the needed background information.
IMHO Tolkien was a master story teller by the time he got about halfway through the two towers. The first part of the written story drags a little but once you get further into it it moves quite well. For those who like charactor development the FOTR is great charactor building information.
If you do not like to read the printed page I would recommend getting an unabridged audio tape set of the LOTR and listening to it. You could borrow such a set from a library without too much searching. www.recordedbooks.com has an unabridged reading of the complete LOTR broken into the three books. I quite enjoyed listening to the FOTR while driving back and forth to work.
That is my two pence worth. YMMV.
dzimmerm
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
First time I hear this, and it's a real disappointment.
I always felt the brilliance of the trilogy was in how Tolkien managed to slow down the pace and return the reader into the real world at the end.
Also, I found it fascinating how the 4 hobbits barely draw a sweat liberating the shire, it reminds me of Neo's final fight with Agent Smith at the end of the Matrix I - one gets the impression that Frodo is half asleep during the "scouring of the shire" because its such a trivial event compared to what they just went through.