Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/22917
DreamWorks Animation Innovates with Cloud Computing The future of CG rendering is defi- nitely in the clouds. During the pro- Shrek duction ever “Global illumination,” Wallen continued, “is a very complex factor to calculate, be- cause you have to not only cast rays of light, but also calculate the bounce and angle of those rays. It certainly has a notable impact in terms of the fullness of the color and, again, it is hard to see speciĀcally other than if we turned it on and then turned it off, you would say, ‘Oh, that really Ālls in a lot of the detail.’ Global illumination creates a lot more ambient light.” Tis subtle but important visual effect wasn’t technologically possible during feature Ālm productions that preceded 2010’s Shrek Forever After. From a processing standpoint, during production on the original Shrek, global illumination was too expensive compu- tationally. In comparison, Shrek Forever After takes full advantage of the added realism of global illumination. Touches like this may be subtle but they cumulatively have a large im- pact on the visual experience of DreamWorks Animation’s Ālms. Simulating the Behavior of Everyday Objects Simulating the behavior of everyday ob- jects in our surroundings—the flow of water, the effects of wind, the movement of fabrics worn by a character—adds a substantial de- gree of processor-intensive work to the ani- mation pipeline. For example, creating real- istic hair on characters is a task that quickly consumes the available processing power. “Hair is complex in terms of simulation,” Wallen said. “Fiona’s hair in the original Shrek was styled as a braid so that it could be treated as a single object. At that time, you didn’t have characters with long, flowing hair in the Ālm because from a simulation standpoint it was very costly to try to do.” of After For- and How to Train Your Dragon, DreamWorks Animation pushed the state-of-the- art and used cloud com- puting to complete over five million render hours in a New Mexico-based compute facility. Ad- dressing peak demand with a utility service mod- el is highly scalable and cost effective. “Our success By Shrek Forever After, processing power allowed DreamWorks Animation artists to unbraid Fiona’s hair. In one scene, she takes off her helmet with the wind blowing Āercely, and her long hair flows in the wind—provid- ing a great creative moment that speaks to her character, one that simply couldn’t have been achieved just a few years earlier. Animators also rely on additional process- ing power to provide quick feedback on ani- mated movements, to handle larger numbers of control points in animated characters, and to provide pre-visualization of various effects. As Derek Chan, head of digital operations, said, “Processing power helps in terms of all the interactivity—being able to see things quickly and keep the creative flow. You don’t want the artist waiting for the computer to react. You want artists to ask their computers to do some- thing and for those things to happen as quickly as possible so that they can go on to the next thing. Waiting doesn’t help the artistic process.” Mini-Farms Offload Tasks to Boost Responsiveness Te use of mini-farms—small clusters of multi-core processor systems—was intro- duced in Shrek the Tird to offload the pro- cessing of complex tasks. It was then used more extensively in Shrek Forever After. Chan with both How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek Forever After is working proof that high-performance computing clouds are not only possible but prac- tical,” said Ed Leonard, DreamWorks Animation’s chief technology officer. “Having the ability to instantly scale compute resources to meet the de- mands of our industry-leading artists is one of the holy grails in CG rendering. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the future of rendering.” This model of providing cloud com- puting services to deliver massive amounts of computational resources on demand promises to change the approach used in a variety of compute- intensive activities. ■ explained that during the production of the original Shrek, artists worked with a computer on their desks, typically a single machine with one or two cores. Each small change that was made, such as moving a light or posing a model, required the computer to go through a lengthy recalculation cycle before the artist could gauge whether the effect or movement worked in the scene. “In Shrek the Tird—and certainly in Shrek December 2010 29