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Rendering Shrek@Home?

Posted by timothy on from the render-it-like-pork dept.

JimCricket writes "There's an interesting piece at Download Aborted about using distributed computing (a la SETI@Home, Grid.org, etc.) in the film industry. With the recent release of Shrek 2, which required a massive amount of CPU time to complete, one must wonder why the film industry doesn't solicit help from their fans. I'd gladly trade some spare CPU time in exchange for the coolness of seeing a few frames of Shrek 3 rendered on my screensaver!"

5 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Making things worse by Baron_Yam · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't animators already insert single-frame porn, etc into these things?

    Can you imagine how quickly the client software would get hacked, and how crappy the movie resulting from nothing but single-frame porn shots would be, especially to photosensitive epileptics?

    1. Re:Making things worse by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 4, Funny

      Right. The gang of protagonists walk into a cave. But, the cave looks familiar somehow. It's the fingers holding the entrance widely open that tips us off. They don't belong there. We look closer at the cave and fear the worst for our band of animated heroes.

      That's not a cave, it's a space station.

      --
      Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
  2. Oh yeah by toygeek · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'll set up a cluster of old Pentium 200MMX's and put 128MB of ram on them... they'll be rockin! When people see my garage full of cables and ancient hardware and ask "WTF are you doing with all this crap?" I'll be able to say "rendering Shrek 3".

    Distributed computing for rendering a movie? I think they have enough hardware problems without getting the worm infected masses into the mix.

    --
    Nobodies Prefect
    Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
  3. Never happen, but... by jarich · · Score: 4, Funny
    Previous posters are right... no one like Pixar would ever give out that kind of technology...

    But they could tell everyone they were, just have a screen saver that pegs the CPU, tells you that you've rendered X frames, and displays a cool screensaver from the movie! :)

    Great PR, no loss of technology, lots of pissed off fans, once they realize the truth!

    --
    Agile Artisans
  4. I doubt it... by millahtime · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder if you could get a section of the frame(s) you (helped) to render...

    /.ers would combine their powers and probubally have a lot of the movie weeks before it was released.

    --
    Evolution or ID?