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South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld reports that South Park producers are turning away from digital linear tape and direct-attached disk storage to a linear tape open setup complimented by Xserve RAID disk arrays. The show's creators never thought South Park would last nine seasons, so a storage hardware upgrade was necessary. J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling. From the article: 'While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each.'"
Isn't South Park done in flash? I know a lot of Adult Swim is done in flash...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Why do that? You'd lose all the things that makes South Park look the way it does - paper textures, realistic shadows, and so on...
It's much better that they do the show in Maya. Not only do you get the photorealistic rendering that gives it that low-tech "animation stand" look, you get Maya's great animation and scripting tools, which make the animators and tech directors happy.
Why is 15TB of storage news? (And they don't even the full 15TB yet!)
;-)
What about the 200TB of Xserve RAID storage for a single project at the University of Wisconsin, which has been up and running for over half a year?
And no, this isn't a project serving a whole campus or an entire university student body. This is one single research project operated by one entity. Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park.
Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware.
;-)
Well, we purchased 35 Xserve RAID arrays for a single installation, for a total of 200TB of storage, after real research and comparisons as opposed to a gut feeling.
The installation is described here, with pictures. It is NOT a University-wide service; this was installed for one research project. We have much more storage around campus from EMC (in our two primary datacenters), Apple, Sun, and Storagetek, among others.
It has been up and running for almost a year now, and the only problem, across all 35 Xserve RAID units running 24x7, has been one failed disk. One alternative looked at was building whitebox PCs in huge tower cases and packing them with disk. Ultimately, it was decided that a major commercial vendor, from which 24x7 support and 4-hour on-site response is available for 3 years, was a good choice. And it was much cheaper than competitive commercial solutions. And at a cost of around $1.60/GB for enterprise storage, you can't really go wrong. And for the Mac OS X-haters out there, there is no Mac OS X as part of this solution. We are using commodity 1U servers running Fedora Core. The Linux boxes see it as generic fibre channel disk, because that's all it is. The servers are monitored with Apple's excellent Java-based, platform independent RAID Admin tools, and some command-line tools we wrote ourselves.
It's proven itself to be rock-solid. And that matches with my experience with the 20 Xserve servers we have installed, starting since around mid-2002: zero hardware failures, of any kind. Franzen had a good gut feeling. And, of course, given Apple's track record with reliability and lack of need for repairs (generally number one) when compared with other vendors from organizations such as Consumer Reports, guessing that the reliability of another Apple product will be good is probably a reasonable guess.
which is kind of hard to do with a multi-terabyte NAS. For quick backups, nothing beats disk, but for archival storage, I'll stick with tape. Kind of hard to restore your environment when the building holding the NAS has been destroyed by some natural disaster.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
They aren't doing Southpark in 3D for the realistic shadows or paper textures, they're using Maya since it allows them much more freedom in the long run with the characters and animation, the very reason they would not use flash or any other 2D program. Character animation in Maya is great & intuitive, especially with animation as simple as Southparks, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes. When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, and instead of having to have an artist draw a cell of animation for each perspective of the character (front, rear, side, etc etc etc), they just turn them around in 3D, flatten the animation curves to give it that instant-motion look and they gotta working scene. A majority of their work is very likely the character animations, scene creation, lip-sync and post-render touch up to remove anything that might not have rendered the way they like.
If they used a 2D program, they would be spending more time dealing with the technical aspect of animation rather than just moving the characters around and putting them where they want them. This is not because 3D is better but simply because it is far more efficient and allows them more flexibility. As far as the paper-look, thats simply a matter of the render engine & post-render effects, nothing that couldn't be done with a 2D program either, but does take a decent amount of time to get looking good, atleast to the degree that post-render touchup will not take much time.
I would not be surprised if most cartoons in the future moved to 3D since the time-savings can really add up if you get a good setup going, and most cartoons animation movement quality is low to begin with so they can save themselves money on all aspects of it from time saved in the character animation phase.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes.
You know absolutely nothing about how South Park is set up. It is done in a 3D package, but the characters are by no means "3D" in the traditional sense -- they are simply flat parts assembled in 3D space, much like the Oxberry camera stand used for the original shorts.
Characters are built "flat" using NURBS curves and surfaced using the "make planar" function, which trims a plane to the outline of the curve. The characters are simply an assemblage flat bits of geometry - the digital equivalent of a cutout bit of paper. These flat bits are textured using scans of actual construction paper.
Animation is done using set driven keys on the visibility tracks of these parts. These keys are tied to the action of a software slider. Running the head turn slider, for example, would turn off visibility on the "right" head and turn it on for the "front" head (I'm simplifying here, but you get the point)
The original decision in 1997 to go with Alias Power Animator 7 was because of the ability to render accurate textures and shadows, as well as the ability to tie sliders to visibility. Back then the sliders were driven by expressions, but Maya allowed the switch to set driven keys, which are more eficient. Flash really wasn't an option back then but 2D software such as After Effects actually were considered - AE could do the textures, but shadows were difficult as were sliders. Thus the decision to go with a 3D package to essentially do a 2D show.
(If you haven't figured it out - I used to work there)