Slashdot Mirror
Animation Sophistication: The Croods Required 80 Million Compute Hours
Lucas123 writes "It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%."
... it's still terrible. They could have made it with construction paper cut-outs and hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months. Also, as is traditional on Slashdot, I am basing my vociferous opinion exclusively on the obnoxious 30-second trailers I've seen, and have not actually seen the movie.
As someone who works in scientific high-performance computing:
1) N -- the most interesting thing from an engineering perspective is the number of MPI threads or whatever ("How many ways am I going to parallelize this thing"), and while you can sometimes get benefits from understanding that two threads running on different cores of the same CPU can communicate faster than two threads on different machines, it (at least in lattice gauge theory, what I do) is not that big of a deal.
2) Not usually, although there are some allocation-granting groups that have conversion factors ("We give you X million core-hours on this machine, here's a conversion table for our other machines.")
How many animation studios were forced out of business? That seems to be Hollywood's favorite metric for Fx and computer animation.
and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there
I prefer Usenet, but yes, it will. And they will still make a profit regardless.
Be seeing you...
Just a guess, but... 1 input (scene), 2 outputs (renders) ? :)
Perhaps 30% is 33.3333333%
Things like 3D assets, textures, etc. don't suddenly need to be duplicated. In fact, the 3D scene itself needs very little changes, just having two cameras instead of one. It's once the movie's rendered that things double in size, but that's only a subset of the total movie's required space.
They could have ... hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months
I can't agree with you more !!!
The development of the CGI technology has opened up a lot of possibilities and leveling the playing fields for many MANY people
But on the other hand, the relative ease of applying CGI animation and effects into movies also gave rise to a whole lot of JUNKS
Hollywood is indeed in decline - back in the days when Ben-Hur was made, it wasn't only the epic sets (it was the largest ever made) that made waves, but the story line, the scripting, the twist and turn, and the suspense, that grabbed the attention of the audience
Nowadays we have movies that are essentially "flat" --- the storyline is flat, the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"
They have taken the FUN out of movie making, and also, movie watching
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
..."over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously."
but yet the quality and entertainment of such movies at best remains about the same.
Besides I always get a kick out of the HD systems at a cinema, sure brag about your HD flickering mirrors and your THX Super surround, doesnt mean squat when the picture is still fuzzy and the speakers sound like a cheap set of computer speakers with too much bass running though 2 metal 1 watt tweeters and a 8 inch floppy as shit "sub"
How does the efficiency of this compare to some of Pixar's movies (like Brave or WALL-E)?
I only say this because sometimes long render times and exuberant technical requirements are not signs of proper craftsmanship. When they are, you often point out why they are- maybe you've developed a new BRDF shader that takes a bit longer to render but offers results closer to an unbiased renderer that nobody else can achieve. Or maybe you've written a new global illumination system that, once again, takes a bit longer to render but offers a diffuse bounce count beyond anything anyone else can achieve in any reasonable amount of time.
The fact that they don't mention why or what that extreme amount of resources went towards raises an eyebrow. Was it a rushed production? Are the scenes so poorly setup and configured that they had to jack up the render engine parameters just to get a usable frame out of the thing? Because the movie looks a hell of a lot like any other CGI flick out there (Brave, Wreck-It Ralph, etc), so if there is some grand justification for these numbers I'm certainly not seeing it.
Having spent many years in the CG industry myself, I can tell you that if you don't have a reason to backup your "big numbers"- you're probably doing it wrong. I can't even count the number of times I've seen someone brew up some insane (not insane as in "wow, that's radical", but insane as in "what the hell were you thinking?") over-the-top lighting rig and a gigantically obfuscated scene setup that requires horrendously long render times for sub-par results, when the same scene heavily optimized and relighted can be rendered out in 1/100th of the time and look identical with a bit of post work (if not better).
Here's an optimisation they missed, which could have sped render time up dramatically. Take the script, and get some people, dressed up as the characters, to read it out in rooms designed to look exactly like the rendered backgrounds. Of course, the people would need to just go beyond just 'reading' the script, they'd have to sort of pretend they were those characters, like it was some sort of act. Then film it.
Modern animated movies don't all consist of clichés, double entendres and wise-cracking sidekicks, nor even have much swish CGI. I am, of course, talking about Studio Ghibli.
Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.
Imagine... All of that just to render a napkin.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
The OS doesn't have a large impact on the application performance. Macs Windows and Linux machines generally all run on the same hardware. If they were Macs though, they would not be using the latest hardware, but several year old Xeon's because that's all you can get in a Mac Pro.
I guess your comment is the variant of "haven't read the article, just the summary".
The script is very well done in terms of human relationships and interactions. It's not a movie about fart jokes, the characters are fairly complex (for an animated movie). It is worth to watch it before forming any opinion.
I can really only see it going 1 of 2 ways. Either the biggest number that's technically possible, carefully tracking all all cores, threads, and processors as separate, also counting double if the person has 2 windows open with Crood-related tasks in both ... or the wildest-ass-guess the could muster. "We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.
This signature is false.
I've heard that the average time to render a frame has stayed around 3 hours, from "Andre and Wally B" to now. May or not be true, but it's probably close. It's amazing to look at the differences between "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 3", which makes a particularly good test case because they have the same characters but they're 15 years apart. I remember being amazed at how things looked in Toy Story, from Rex's bumpy texture to the messed-up paint at the bottom of Andy's door, but if you watch the first right after watching the third, you'll be amazed at the differences. I'd say it's most noticeable in the human characters but if you look closely you'll see it everywhere.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there
The difference is that the paying customer has a say in what future productions and budgets will be green-lighted.
The unexpected success of "How To Train Your Dragon" spawned a sequel, a Christmas special, and 40 episodes of the best production values and scripting of any animated series you could name.
Now and again the geek will ride the coattails of WALL-E to the heights or be tossed a bone like "Serenity." Mostly what he gets is a half-century or so of "Dr Who," "Star Trek," and "Star Wars." To tale a chance on something new is too big a risk.
The images will be OpenEXR, with 16bit floats per colour channel, uncompressed. RGB is a bit optimistic, it's more likely to be RGBA+depth. Typical film footage is a 2k image, or slightly above 1080p.
"We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.
Thats exactly what they did. From the article, they have 3000 Blades, and it took 3 years.
...which works out to 3169 pixels rendered per "compute hour." Horribly inefficient.
The article also mentions 250 billion pixels in the movie....
"His name was James Damore."
No, seriously, I am.
Let me tell you about the Hollywood screenwriting process as applied to the vast majority of screenwriters.
First the new script is tossed on a pile with a hundred others waiting to be read by one of the teenage intern scriptreaders enslaved at every studio and production company.
When they finally get to your script, these readers skim through page one, looking for that Big Grabber. Hollywood's Writing-by-Numbers bible stipulates that every screenplay have a Big Grabber on page one. That usually means EXPLOSION. (Hollywood's standard screenplay format requires that caps be used for sounds, significant action, and events.)
So the teen skims page one for words such as (but not limited to) EXPLOSION, GUNFIRE, STEAMY SEX, or DECAPITATES. If they do not see those words, they usually toss the script on the huge Of No Interest pile.
Sometimes they'll keep reading in the hope that the next Hollywood stipulation is met: Something Big by page ten. If they don't see Something Big by page ten, they toss the script.
Very occasionally, the teen will keep reading, desperate to see the next stipulation fulfilled: Something Shocking on page 17. Note I said "on" page 17; It has to be page 17. Not page 16, not page 18. It has to be page 17. Why? Because it's in Hollywood's Writing-by-Numbers bible, and who can argue with that?
Well, if that Page 17 Something Shocking requirement is ignored by the worthless writer, who has also not done his or her duty by meeting the page one Big Grabber and page ten Something Big demands, the script will be tossed, as you can imagine.
However, a reader may keep reading once in a blue moon, clinging to the belief that the writer will redeem him or herself on page 30. Page 30 is the last chance. It's where Things Change. There is a chance that the otherwise-ignorant writer has not forgotten the holy Hollywood Writing-by-Numbers bible and has saved something great for page 30. Something Different. Something that Changes Everything.
If it's not there, the script is tossed. End of story in 99.9% of instances.
Some other points: Dialogue is Bad. Dialogue is Boring. Anything longer than Die, muthafucka! is unacceptable. Dialogue puts the teenage intern scriptreader to sleep, and if it puts a teenage intern scriptreader to sleep, it will put everyone to sleep. It just stands to reason. So dialogue is out.
Story is also bad. It just gets in the way of the movie. Remember, it's EXPLOSION, CAR CHASE, BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.
As long as you have, say, a psychotic serial killer, a hot chick in danger, a popular lead from a hit TV show, exploding helicopters, super heroes, almost-but-not-quite-gay hot guy Vampires (who have some very close male friends), at least 25 zombies, and an ending from which no one walks away alive except maybe the lead and the hot chick (-zombie clause-), you have a Hollywood movie.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. At some point in the not too distant future, games and moves are going to SHARE art assets. Will we be able to remix the assets on our computers and make new adventures with cinema quality props??
Good-bye
I saw the preview trailer...excellent graphics, top-notch animation, very good voice acting...but it failed to grab my attention. There was a void.
On the other hand, the movie 'Up' was a lot cruder, in terms of technical aspects, but so much more moving than 'the croods'.
If you want dumb kids, stick with the status quo. Have you watched a Looney Toons cartoon in adulthood? There's loads more depth behind those cartoons than anything coming from Dreamworks today. You can enjoy it while you're young and when you're old. Sure beats all the sex jokes in Shrek - which really didn't need to be there. There's plenty of ways to be intelligent, funny, and still appeal widely to kids.