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

*drool*

[Z0mb1eman]

Is this... could this... could this be the mythical Beowulf Cluster talked of in Slashdot posts of yore? Could such a beast truly exist?

Re:*drool*

[Telecommando]

My Precious... My PRECIOUS!

Nasty Slashdottesss steal my precious!

Re:*drool*

[Sabalon]

you're right - but could you imagine a beowulf cluster of these :)

The One Rack

[FunWithHeadlines]

One rack to rule them all,
One rack to cluster 'em,
One rack to render them all,
and in the darkness draw them.

-------

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

Oh yeah?

[DarthVeda]

It may be able to render Return of the King but I doubt it will be able to deliver 10 fps for DooM 3. Time to upgrade some more, weta!

Really the top?

[cly]

If you look at top500.org, you see that the current top Intel-based cluster is #5, the one with 2304 procs in LLNL.

The article says their cluster has 'more than 2000 processors'. So presumably they mean 'more than 2304'?

Play Mount Doom

[Nom du Keyboard]

Can I play Mount Doom on it afterwards? Please, pretty please?

floppy drives?

[RV.eq.VFG]

.. power units, fans, floppy drives, switches ... floppy drives? They are living in a dream world with pixes, leprechauns and eskimos

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

[Moryath]

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.

Re:Question

[zokrath]

Bah, last post was apparently in HTML format and managed to make a single unreadable block of text. That will teach me not to preview...Anyway, reposted in plain text:

A long, long ways.

Computer games can run at 60+ frames per second because they are barely doing any work when compared to top of the line rendering engines.

Raytracing, dozens of texture passes, multiple realistic lightsources; and these are just for a two dimensional surface. Making realistic looking skin requires multiple translucent layers to simulate the complicated appearance of skin.

Also, there is the size factor. Video games generally run at 1024x768 to 1600x1200. Movie quality shots are rendered at many times that resolution, which greatly increases the number of pixels that have to be rendered. Gollum may only be 800 pixels tall on your monitor, but he's probably rendered at least ten times as large; we'll say 10,000x 10,000 for calcualtion simplification.

That's 10E7 pixels, so to display it at 24 frames per second you would need to be pushing 24E8 pixels a second. 24,000,000,000.

Even if every pixel only took a single cycle (which it might, with the right hardware pipeline in the future), you would need 240 terahertz of power (plus overhead) to display it in real time, along with enough RAM to hold the model and texture data for everything that's going to be onscreen within the next minute or so.

Considering that they have around 2000 x 2.0 X 2 = 8 terahertz available to them, and it still takes ages to render each frame of the complicated battle scenes, I'd say we are going to hit the limit of Moore's law before we could reasonably get hte power to render cinematic scenes in real time. Perhaps with quantum processing we will be able to within the next 20 years or so.

Re:Question

[donglekey]

Also, there is the size factor. Video games generally run at 1024x768 to 1600x1200. Movie quality shots are rendered at many times that resolution, which greatly increases the number of pixels that have to be rendered. Gollum may only be 800 pixels tall on your monitor, but he's probably rendered at least ten times as large; we'll say 10,000x 10,000 for calcualtion simplification.

This is actually not true. Film resolution is around 2048x1556 and everything is rendered the size that it is needed. For the most part, the difference in rendering speed is because hardware is very fast and very efficient, and takes lots of shortcuts. There aren't many textures, they aren't very high resolution, there isn't any raytracing, there are very few lights, no global illumination, no hair rendering, no volumetric rendering, not nearly as many polygons, no particles or cloth simulations, very few deformations, and lighting calculation is done on vertexes and then interpolated instead of on every pixel (this will change with Doom 3 and Half Life 2 which is the real reason they look so much better). Renderman also subdivides everything down to one polygon per pixel to get perfectly smooth sufaces and good displacement. There is also the issue of motion blur, depth of field, and rendering of composites, which also takes a very long time. Anti-aliasing in every step is crucial for any kind of non-realtime CG, but it not as important for games, and that by itself makes a huge huge difference.

A Beowulf cluster of... wait wait !!!

[frs_rbl]

... one of Weta's biggest problems was the lack of space, which prompted the move to blade servers - slim units containing processors and memory which slide into a separate chassis containing power units, fans, floppy drives, switches and connections to the other servers.

Why not use a cluster of Cappuccinos then? They fit neatly into the previous description, don't they?

See...

1- Cluster of Cappuccinos
2- ?????
3- Time trip to Soviet Russia (where Cappuccinos cluster you)
4- PROFIT!!!

Now seriously, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!!

I think I'll go to sleep.

Pfft.

[Braintrust]

When I was a boy, we did our rendering calculations by hand. A pencil, lots of paper, and we liked it! These kids today and their fancy calculating machines.... bah, humbug.

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

[ScottGant]

If you mean not making a movie that basically boring with an egomainiac director then yes, I hope they don't pull a Titanic.

I mean, why did Cameron have to take an actual sub down to the real ship? Would have been cheaper I'm sure to use minatures. But ok, he wanted to do that. Fair enough.

But using the same exact rug company that made the rugs of the Titanic? Having the Blue Star logo on the under side of the dinner plates? Why waste money on stuff you'll never see on screen?

They keep saying it was the most expensive movie to make of all time, but it's all on the screen. That's hogwash. Cameron was out of control. But since all he has around him are "yes men", no one's going to reign him in.

But it paid off in the end, which is really the true story. How an over-blown expensive movie made by an insane director with a boring storyline made so much money.

Here's the synopsis of Titanic:

"Oh, it's so big! It's so elegant! Hi I'm Jack. Hi. Let me draw your picture. Run down to the bottom of the ship, get sweaty in the car, run back to the top of the ship. Hit an iceberg. Run back down to bottom of ship. Get seperated. Run back to the top of the ship. Oh no, forgot the big diamond thingy! Run back down to the bottom. Oh, the water's cold. Hang on! Get in the boat! No, I don't want to leave you. Hang on! Oh, the water's cold. Hang on! I'll never let got. She lets go. Oh, help me, a ship! OH, I'm old now. Let's throw away the diamond thingy and take away my grand-daughters inheritance in one fell swoop. Then end."

Dangerous Downtime

[heretic108]

After ROTK gets mastered, there'll be one hell of a lot of processing power laying idle.

"Your conviction was brought to you by WETA Productions, proud suppliers of counter-encryption solutions to the law enforcement community"

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:For the last time, there is no Scouring in ROTK

[trampel]

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.

In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows 95 on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows 95 CD. To my surprise he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned on the oven. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450920F923A40EE10 E510CC98D444AA08E1324

'I cannot understand the fiery letters,' I said.

'No but I can,' he said. 'The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'

One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

ref

Re:In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie.

[PD]

Completely unbelievable. Nobody would call Win 95 "my precious."

Re:I haven't read the books

[HeghmoH]

Yeah. Here's some summaries of other equally shitty pieces of literature:

Romeo and Juliet: "Romeo and Juliet love each other, but their families hate each other, so they kill themselves."

Les Miserables: "A criminal escapes, and an inspector tries to recapture him."

And one that our readers may be more familiar with, Cryptonomicon: "An internet start-up tries to make it big with help from an employee's dead father."

Plans for a sequel?

[pb]

Here's my dream for a sequel to TITANIC; it's also a love story, and could also pave the way for an awesome TITANIC 3:

Start like the first movie, panning around underwater, until you find Jack's dead, bloated corpse. Play some heart-rending music, pan around, whatever. Then, just like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the corpse WAKES UP.

He rises up and starts walking. Then feel free to add whatever adventures or misadventures with sharks, undead pirates, giant squids, whatever, etc., etc. As much fun as that is, it is secondary to our main focus.

However, as the movie goes on, Jack's appearance should get more and more gruesome, with decomposing bits of flesh that fall off or get eaten, barnacles, sea weed, whatever. By the end he should appear to be part zombie, part skeleton, with some debris thrown in for good measure. However, he should also be totally grotesque in appearance, and therefore still be recognizable as Leonardo DiCaprio.

Finally, our (anti-)hero gets close to his goal. He looks up, and sees a ring falling through the water. He grabs the ring, floats/swims upward, looks up at the old woman leaning over and staring down, and says in his best boyish Leo voice "Hey, you dropped this!"

She then has a heart attack, falls into the water, and dies. And they're finally together, forever! Cue triumphant romantic music.

THE END

Background is essential

[dzimmerm]

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

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

[Trogre]

You mean like LOTR:FOTR:

F"rodo's been stabbed! He's going to die!
No... wait, he'll be fine.
Frodo's been skewered with a spear! He's going to die!
No... wait, he's fine.
Gandalf fell down a big pit! He died!"

Or LOTR: TTT

"No... wait, Gandalf's fine. And white.
Aragorn fell off a cliff! He died!
No... no wait, he's fine."

Re:588???

[Tihstae]

I would just like to know why 588 computers?

IBM Blade Center that holds the blade server is 7U. Each Blade Center holds 14 blade servers. IBM's racks are 42U.

42U Rack / 7U Blade Center = 6 Blade Centers/rack
14 servers X 6 Blade Centers = 84 servers/rack
7 Racks X 84 servers = 588 Servers