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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."
Could delay release maybe. Get it right WETA! :)
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
There's no free PR/hype to be generated by saying 'ok we're gonna use the same computers we used before'.
Shot here refers to standard movie terminology, that is what is between 2 edit cuts. I mean shots of just the New Zealnd scenery, like some of Rohan, require no VFX. Sure one VFX shot may go through different iterations but in the end it's still one shot.
And yes 1200 is very high. I usually consider anything above 400 VFX shots to be high. The Perfect Storm had less than 400 and Pearl Harbor and Ai had about 200 and they still feel VFX heavy. Asylum VFX, a small but very good boutique shop can only handle about 200 shots per project on average though they grew and upgraded so they could handle 400 for Master and Commander. When the makers even doubled that it was a bit too much for them.
OK /. How far away is a system like this from real-time photorealistic rendering? I've always wondered why somebody didn't throw enough hardware together to render film-quality CG at 30 frames/sec. What are the technical limitations preventing this?
The LLNL cluster is of 2.4 Xeons, these are 2.8's. Combine that with the 2000+ number and it very well may be the top.
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
Yes.
hour after hour of battle scenes again?
Yes. Or rather, at least two fairly large ones, the latter being the penultimate hopeless battle.
What percentage of the movie can be easily projected to be CG
Probably same ratio as seen in TTT.
[can Jackson] tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story
The "real" story has many details that necessarily get lost in a fast-moving screen. You can't really grok LOTR without being infected by the books first.
Serious questions ...
I'm a fan of the books who found the movies to be suprisingly faithful in spirit to them, to the highest degree that can be expected for a screen version.
The article mentioned that the battle with Shelob was one of the two fights requiring a lot of CGI, which is...interesting. And reminded me of two things:
;-)
1. At my next-to-last job, we had a server named Shelob, complete with a little name sticker on the outside. Now, instead of outside the server, Shelob's going to be inside it.
2. When I talked to Sauron (aka Sala Baker after he accepted the Hugo for The Fellowship of the Rings at last year's worldcon, I asked about Shelob and he assured me that Shelob was going to be "really cool."
3. Of course, I didn't realize at that point that Shelob had been pushed back into The Return of the King; if it hadn't, 2002 would have been a banner year for giant spider films, since Eight Legged Freaks also came out that year. I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire. Which is something of a shame, because I rather like John Clute's theory that the scourging of the Shire represents a diminished recapitulation of Sauron's fall, in the same way Sauron's own fall is a diminished recapitulation of Morgoth's. Oh well...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire.
How many times does this need to be repeated? In just about every interview with Peter Jackson, cast, and crew since 1999, they have said the Scouring will not be in the movie. It's in the DVD audio commentaries, endless magazine articles, and web postings. They paid homage to it in the Mirror of Galadriel. This has been stated countless times.
For the last time, there will be no Scouring in the Return of the King!
"Sufferin' succotash."
Yes, this is a true fact that is comming to light. Even at my job, when you add more computing power, you do not reduce the time to takes to complete a job, just increase the overall quality of that job.
The old Teradata NCR massively parallel DBMS used to run 486s in the mid-90's.
It's kind of funny that the main factor in Weta Digital's decision on the Blade servers was the space they took up, not the cost. Apparently Weta is running out of room.
588 servers, each with 2 CPUs, in seven racks.
That's 84 servers and 168 CPUs to a rack. Now blades are supposed to be more space efficient than regular rackmount servers.
Rackable sells short 1U dual-proc systems - so short you can fit 2 back-to-back in a standard 4-post cabinet, so they can fit 176 2.8 GHz Xeons in a standard cabinet.
Doesn't make the blade servers sound too impresssive...
I know your joking but most likely who ever ordered them had a set amout to spend and 588 was the most they could get
I haven't read the books
That's too bad. Amazon.com readers picked these books as the best fiction of the 20th century. To really enjoy the movie you have to know the books.
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
He ties all the loose ends together, and then in the appendices adds in enough backstory to support another 10 books.
Do you think that Jackson can tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story in this one?
I don't think that it is possible to tell the LOTR story in less than about 20-30 hours of movies. When I saw that somebody was going to try I shuddered. There is a lot of stuff getting mutilated or left out in these movies.
On the other hand I do not believe that it is possible to do any better on film than Jackson is doing. What he is doing is far beyond what I thought would happen.
They've forgotten they're STORYTELLERS, not architects, generals, etc. Remember LOTR is a story that sold MILLIONS of copies with no special effects other than a nondescript painting on the cover of the book.
Jackson & company have done a bang-up job so far. Indeed, I think in many ways they've done a better job than Tolkien did -- I found myself actually caring about what happened to the characters in the movies, whereas many of the same characters in the books are stiffly drawn and end up seeming bloodless and interchangeable despite the elaborate genealogies. For all his strengths, Tolkien was really not a particularly good writer...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
They already DO promote open source. They GPLed the plugin that they used to go from Maya to RenderMan. Pretty cool of them, isn't it?
The plugin is here:
http://www.nomadicmonkey.com/tools.html
No, but since the movie is planned for release in december as the others were, they saw they were short on time to render the scenes, so they bought more cpu power, to complete it in time =)
There have been several stories about these huge clusters used to speed up rendering. Do any consumer level home video apps support offloading to other hosts?
The available tools are becoming extremely powerful. iMovie and Final Cut on MacOS are great. There are several good Windows options too. But, the conversion from MiniDV to MEPG2 for DVD takes several hours.
How long before they include an agent to load on other hosts, to distribute processing? It seems like this would be pretty easy to implement. Is anyone doing it?
Thank you. Matrix Reloaded was perhaps the worst movie I've seen in years.....At times i felt like I was back in my Philosophy class, with all the meaningless drivel they kept spouting out.
If they wanted to make a action/kung-fu flick then they should have gotten actors that are actually convincing at it. I've seen orange belts with better skills.
Yes but I don't consider the digital color timing part of the VFX. Before the digital era and even before Star Wars, there were/are jobs called colorists which would time (that is color correct) the whole film. They didn't have anything to do with VFX, if anything they have to work with the finished VFX shots to match them to the surrounding shots. Now grading is becoming more digital and it has some connection with VFX as it's sort of related to compositing since you have to match elements.
The LOTR trilogy is using Colossus which was made by 5D which went out of business and Colorfront got a hold of it and I belive Discreet acquierd them and the new product will be called lustre. You can read a bit about it here:
5D Colossus Grades "The Lord Of The Rings" Trilogy
Colorfront to Develop 5D Colossus
Interestingly I thought sometime the color correction was to extreme and too contrasting. There is a shot at the end of TTT with the 3 main characters after being victorious in Helm's Deep, and the shot of Gandalf (which supposdely has the sun right behind him) is really contrasting to the shots of Aragorn and Legolas in terms of saturation and flestones in particular and looks a bit softer. There are several shots like that in both films which made me groan a bit ut are not a real big deal. It kinda reminded me of the extreme color saturation and washout in some shot of Geonosis in Ep. 2. I still think O Brother Where Art Thou is the most consistent in terms of extensive digital grading, but that's just me.
Is it me, or does the phrase, "The cluster will be used to render the frames drawn by the animators..." bother anybody else? If the frames were "drawn," why would you need to render them? ;)
This is 3D CG. There is no drawing involved in the frames that need to be rendered.
Normally, I avoid being anal, but I couldn't leave this one alone.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Perhaps they'll add some more work units to their setiathome stats?
"New Line understands Peter's vision and understands it is bound by technology, so it makes sure technology is not a bottleneck," Houston said. "In the big scheme, a few million dollars for a couple of thousand processors will pay dividends."
In so many of the things that we do the payoff for the use of new technology is not always obvious to everyone. It must be nice to work in an industry where the relationship between the latest technology and the payoff is so easily defined.
But then Tolkien was a little bit uncomfortable with the world-creating industry embodied in his own works as well. The root of Melkor's evil in the Silmarillion is his desire to create his own world (when really all he can do is warp the existing one--changing elves into orcs). The conflict between Tolkien's utter devotion to his desire for unreal worlds and his willingness to look at the dark side of that desire makes for both interesting reading and interesting viewing. (It's a particularly relevant theme for geeks, I think.)