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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!"

7 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Doubt it'll happen... by Zweistein_42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Security issues would be a concern I'm sure. There's plenty of hackers who'd see no harm in, for example, extracting a number of images from around the world and sticthing a trailer, etc. And of course, rendering is a "trial-and-error" process - would they want people to have access to broken scenes? Or deleted scenes? Speculation would seriously dampen their ability to control marketing and release info. On the technical side, farms are reliable and predictable. Who can figure out how many fans will keep their computers up tonight for the critical preview tomorrow? What about the decline of interest after first little while? Distributed computing of this sort isn't well suited for commercial projects with fixed schedules. Not that I don't think it'd be COOL... I just don't think it'll happen :-/

    --
    - To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
    1. Re:Doubt it'll happen... by joib · · Score: 5, Insightful


      the film studios I'm sure have crazy fiber/multi-gigabit interconnects within their rendering farms.

      While the amount of data to move around probably is too much for dialup, gigabit ethernet is certainly fast enough, and dirt cheap as it's integrated on motherboards. If you look at the top500 list, you see that weta digital (the company which did the CG for lord of the rings IIRC) has a couple of clusters on the list, and they have gig ethernet.

      Basically, while rendering is cpu-intensive it's not latency sensitive, so there's no point in blowing a huge amount of cash on a high end cluster interconnect.

    2. Re:Doubt it'll happen... by Rothron+the+Wise · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've been unable to dig up the reference, but I read in an article about Pixar's "Monster's Inc." that for some frames it took longer to load the geometry than actually rendering the frame.

      SETI and Folding@Home work because of the massive asymmetry between the amount of data and the CPU power required, and although you _perhaps_ could find subtasks that could easilly be "offsourced" so to speak, that made sense performance wise, I very much doubt that it would interface very nicely with the way the artists work, or make any sort of economic sense.

      --
      A witty .sig proves nothing
  2. Slashdot BLOG advertising... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nice to see you can advertise your NEW BLOG on slashdot...

    how much did it cost?

  3. do you really want this? by jfroebe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you really want the MPAA to run programs on your computer?

    --
    No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
  4. The reason why..... by reality-bytes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The main reason they don't employ this technique is that their own 'render-farms' are a known quantity; they can, with reasonable accuracy, calculate how long a given scene will take to render, whereas with public distributed computing this calculation is not possible.

    There are many variables in distributed public computing such as:

    *Different CPU capabilities.
    *Different OS capabilities
    *High/Low use Systems
    *People's 'uptime'
    *Users leaving the project before its completion etc.

    Another risk is that another movie-house could start a production which everyone sees as 'cooler' and your entire userbase decides to up-sticks and render for them instead.

    --
    Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
  5. How cool would the other way be? by jmpresto_78 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How cool would it be to see them allocate THEIR distributed system to projects like SETI, etc. Even though I'm sure there are other projects being worked on, one would imagine the system is pretty dormant after a release.