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Weta Digital Grows Cluster
Korgan writes "A little over 3 years after their last upgrade, Weta Digital has just added another 250 more blade servers to their render farm to help with the final renderings of King Kong. From the article: "The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington. They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world." And all that computing power is still available for hire when Peter Jackson isn't using it."
They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs
Total processors: 1644.
Now, the Xeons do a bit better than the run-of-the-mill P4, but 10x faster? No way.
For that matter, they don't run faster at all. They just do somewhat better (as in, 10-25%, not 913%) on certain types of memory-heavy tasks.
Someone either made a major typo or pulled numbers from their netherregion...
The problem is that CG is used so indiscriminately now. In the begining, it was only used to do things that you couldn't do any other way (like the living water in The Abyss or the T1000 morphs in Terminator 2). Now-a-days CG is used as a cost cutting measure to do things that could be done in a more traditional way but would cost a little more. I was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark the other day (which still looks great after 20+ years) and thinking, if they shot that movie today they would have just used CG instead of finding 1000 trained snakes, and it would look like crap.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Am I the only one who prefers models and stop motion animation to the CGI garbage of the last 15 years?
It depends on the CG. If I don't notice that it's CG I tend to like it. If it looks like CG I tend to groan.
Jurassic park was extremely well done CG and I loved it. Spiderman was, well, cartoony at best (but a good story and Kirsten Dunst go a long way). In Gone in Sixty Seconds they should have just used real cars in all the scenes. There was no excuse for CG shenanegans. But the New York scene in AI was flawless and would have been impossible to film in scale models alone.
Notice a trend? If the director is a master of visuals and refuses to accept compromise (just try to tell Spielberg "that's the best I can do") then your CG is gonna work. If your level of visual excellence is better exemplified by Xena the Warrior Princess then you may just be willing to settle.
I don't mean to bash Raimi. I loved a lot of his stuff, including Spiderman. But did any of you really think Spiderman's level of CG excellence met the level of Spielberg? Directors and producers need to be more demanding of their digital special effects. They should reject mediocre work as readily as wire work with, well, visible wires.
TW