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Rendering Shrek@Home?
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!"
I wonder if that would be considered pirating by the MPAA. Smart people out there would figure out a way to "download" the movie from the frame generated. Then there would be no reason to see it in the theater. Just playing the devils advocate. Personally I think it would be REALLY cool :)
Also, there is bound to be a fan site created that would allow users to upload their rendered images and somebody would manage to piece it together into a halfway coherent movie. Then some nerd would mystery science theatre 3000 it and it would become an internet phenomenon. Hmmm, maybe that's not a bad thing...
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
The problem with trying to help render frames is that your system needs to have the data to do it (3D objects, textures, etc.)- not to mention the renderer. Companies wouldn't take kindly to sending off their IP data (esp. custom 3D models/textures/shaders) to the masses to be hacked. Having people get a hold of the "official" Shrek models and textures for example would be a bad thing.
I'm not a film tech -- but besides abuse and security issues, what's proposed here is just does not seem possible under low bandwidth conditions. it's not like you can just run off to computer #2,398 and say "go render frame 1,503" -- there are textures and models and state information that probably total somewhere on the order of gigabytes (give or take a factor of ten) in order to render that frame. Joe Dialup isn't going to be able to handle that; the film studios I'm sure have crazy fiber/multi-gigabit interconnects within their rendering farms.
If they could find a way to offload some intermediate calculations (like deformations of hair or fabric or something that can be used as an intermediate result in a scene) then that might be a clever use for a distributed.net style technique.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
If you send the same input to three different IP addresses (extra-paranoid: use three different top-level IP blocks) and get the same result back, you can be reasonably certain that the result is valid. If there are -any- discrepancies in the images, assume that one (or more) was improperly rendered, discard all three, and try again with three new addresses.
Even should you manage to hit three different IP addresses that return the exact same 'hacked' image, it's not exactly hard for an editor to step through the movie frame-by-frame, looking for discrepancies...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
The last film I worked on, we had anywhere from 800MB to 12GB of data per frame that the renderer had to have. I am talking about compressed renderman rib archives, textures, normal maps, displacements, shadow and other maps.
The data was mostly generated at render time for things like hair and shadow maps, but if it was being distributed, there is no way to do that - they would be transferred beforehand.
Also, there are always many terabytes of data generated by the renderers for each render layer, for diffuse color, specular color, etc.
It is just not feasible to transfer all that data around, and its not like bittorrent or other p2p systems will help much with that since each frame would most likely only be rendered by a few people (for verification).
Also, the model geometry and shaders (and somtimes textures) are closely guarded secrets... In short, if a major film were ever to do somthing like this, everyone participating would need huge (> 100mbit) bandwidth and a LOT of disk space and also be under very tight NDAs.
But this opens up a whole new world to the independents. Shrek2 just shattered all kinds of records in terms of cash. And there are no real actors.
So what happens when a few talented indies get their paws on the processing power required to blow the doors off of convetional actors? It won't be goodbye to Hollywood just yet but I can't wait for the first CG/Anime crossover. I can't imagine how Cowboy Bebop would fare if it didn't have the cartoon stigma.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The heck with that, why would they want the 3D wireframe models to get out on the net? What do people think the frames are rendered from, anyhow? I predict it would be less than one week between someone figuring out how to extract the models, and someone else making a low-res animation of those models doing the nasty with each other.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Shrek2 just shattered all kinds of records [...] And there are no real actors.
You do still need voice actors. With an animated feature, a really good voice actor can really add to the experience.
And you still need to make the character models move in realistic ways. So you need motion capture actors, or else truly skilled "puppeteers" to animate the models.
All that said, I actually agree with you. Take a look at Killer Bean 2: The Party by Jeff Lew. One guy made this, using his computer at his home. I think it's really cool that people can just make movies now with only a tiny budget.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
From: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/ap-art.html#i mp
The Internet Movie Project renders images for computer-animated movies. The project is an open-source collaboration of volunteers and is just for fun. It is still in the development phase, but you can volunteer to be a "render-farmer," to render images for test animation sequences. Anyone who can run the free POV-Ray ray-tracing program can join this project, although the supporting scripts and software needed for the project only work on the Windows and Linux platforms for now.
Sony Imageworks definitely didn't think gigabit was fast enough, and that was 6-7 years ago when I talked to them. They were deploying some sort of customized super-HIPPI setup for shipping their digital assets around.