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."

Comments

Here's hoping they don't pull a Titanic!

[TiMac]

I hope they don't get through the whole rendering process and discover that something is wrong....like they did in Titanic (James Cameron was pissed that one of the propellers on the ship was spinning when the ship was sinking).

Could delay release maybe. Get it right WETA! :)

Re:Here's hoping they don't pull a Titanic!

[littlerubberfeet]

Well, in response to rendering mistakes...you pay for both processor time, usually in MHz/minute if I remember correctly, and a certain amount of huma proofing time.

On top of that, any decent director watches the film in wireframe or a rough-render to make sure it is correct.

Re:Here's hoping they don't pull a Titanic!

[Overly Critical Guy]

You've sure picked an odd way to criticize Titanic, considering:

* They hand-made the weapons and armor for Lord of the Rings, down to invidual armor links.
* The set directors were told to treat everything historically, so you get everything from accurate Dwarvish runes everywhere that you'll never see to miniature dishes in Bilbo's kitchen to specially made "Elvish" boots with leaf designs that nobody will ever see.
* In the soundtrack, choirs are singing in Elvish, Dwarvish, and even Entish.
* ...and much, much more. These are just the ones off the top of my head. I watched just the costume segment alone on the extended DVD and marvelled at all the "authentic" throwaway stuff that nobody will ever, ever see in the movie.

Sometimes, it's all about authenticity. Maybe you won't see it on screen, but you'll feel it through the actors, who feel it being on the set.

Imagine a...

[sn00ker]

movie industry based around the following ideal:

Unlike most post-production houses which bid for work and pay for equipment out of that price, New Line Cinema bankrolls the technology Weta Digital needs to complete its task.

CGI would probably have progressed even further than the current state-of-the-art. New Line's management obviously need to be given a +5 Insightful mod :P

Re:Umm, what happened to the ones he had?

[MisterFancypants]

There's no free PR/hype to be generated by saying 'ok we're gonna use the same computers we used before'.

Re:Is that really enough?

[malducin]

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.

Question

[boatboy]

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?

Re:Question

[tolldog]

Because for what they are doing, it takes a long long time to render... i think industry standard is still over an hour a frame.

And it has stayed pretty linear as machines get faster... because quality is always improving as well. They will always push the specs of the systems...

No real point in doing it real time... it still needs to be animated. And most of the animation has complex solvers on it to do all the itsy details that takes up time...

-Tim

Re:Question

[Iscariot_]

I think a good answer would be to first point out that non-real-time rendering is not yet optimal. Before something goes real-time (for making movies) we'd have to be able to generate 100% photo-realistic imagry. Only then can/should we worry about making that process real-time.

I'd imagine we're some years, or decades, away from that.

Why do something in real-time, giving you so-so quality, when the audience expects top of the line cgi that pushes computers to their limits even though the rendering time is still staggering.

Re:Question

[donglekey]

It really depends on what resolution the film scan is done at, and the aspect ratio of the movie. 4k res scans of 35mm are less frequent than 2k scans because they are expensive and not always neccesary. A 3D render should never have to render something above the final resolution it will be displayed as.

Thoughts on Shelob

[Nova Express]

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...

For the last time, there is no Scouring in ROTK

[Overly Critical Guy]

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!

Re:I haven't read the books

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Clusters for home video production?

[-tji]

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?

Weta as Saruman

[xmbrst]

Tolkien would surely have been horrified at the idea of a great engine generating his world: "whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges." I imagine ents demolishing a wall of clustered machines.

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.)

'"White!" [Saruman] sneered. "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken."'