Vanguard Animation in Los Angeles is using SGI high-performance server technology to produce the computer-animated feature Space Chimps. Twentieth Century Fox planned a US theatrical release in summer 2008. Vanguard is producing the film with Starz Media, while Odyssey Entertainment had already sold it into more than 20 countries.
Around 200 people were working on the 80-minute film at the Production Way facility in Burnaby near Vancouver. SGI supplied a rendering system designed to process large, high-resolution image files.
The Vanguard team uses RenderMan to render sequences created in Maya. Typical Maya scene files for Space Chimps measure several megabytes, and a single shot requires hundreds of frames. A 10 MB Maya file can quickly generate 100 to 200 image files, each several megabytes in size. The previous server environment did not provide enough compute performance to process this workload at the required speed.
Vanguard tested several servers with PipelineFX Qube render-management software and compared their price and performance. It selected the SGI Workflow-Ready Solution for Render Management built on Altix XE310 servers. Compatibility with the Linux and Intel environment used for RenderMan and Maya was important, and the hardware was configured specifically for PipelineFX Qube.
“The Altix XE310 servers provide high compute density. We are now 20 to 30 percent faster,” said Vanguard pipeline specialist Troy Brooks. The new servers used 3 GHz processors instead of the previous 2.2 GHz units. Brooks identified compute speed and I/O throughput as the two main requirements because both source and rendered files were large. Each Altix XE310 installation placed two dual-socket boards supporting dual- and quad-core Xeon processors in a 1U chassis. That provided two network connections across two separate computers rather than attaching eight or 16 cores through one interface.
SGI argued that render-farm utilisation directly affects production costs because artist time spent on animation, lighting, characters, and objects is the largest expense in a computer-animated film. Faster iterations allow artists to test more variations of a shot.
Associate producer Tom Jacomb said Qube allowed the team to continue refining characters, lighting, and effects while the SGI Altix systems reduced processing time. Vanguard used ten SGI Altix XE310 servers with 64 GB of RAM, four Intel Xeon quad-core processors, and Red Hat Linux Fedora Core 5.
