What is Digg?178 Comments
- teamparadox, on 10/12/2007, -4/+58The OS wasnt the problem the hardware was, so how does that make linux king as far as this story goes?
- WalterDirt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+44I was going to reply to that also. The article clearly states they used linux before and after on Dell boxes, they simply replaced NFS with SAN.
Now even posters can't be bothered with reading the articles. - ZekeTheSquirrel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31Being a computer animator, I know a little about rendering. With one computer, even some simple scenes can take an ungodly amount of time to render a single frame. With movie quality work like Cars, a single computer would take days to render a single frame (assuming it didn't run out of memory first).
Pixar uses a rendering farm, which is a series of computers networked together, to render their movies. One hour per frame, per computer, with about 300 computers comes down to taking a couple weeks to render the final product. - somerandomnerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+28"I can't figure out why it would take so long with so many computers on the task. I mean, that is a huge amount of processing. What exactly makes them so difficult to render?"
Hundreds of objects with millions of polygons each. True reflectivity means that scenes have to be effectively rendered again from the point of view of the reflective surface. High resolution tectures with seperate layers for the base colour, reflection maps, specularity maps (specularity = shininess.) All in a very high density video format. And although the load can be spread over a network, the light on everything is interacting with everything else, so it's not like you can just do something like let Machine A do the left of the frame and Machine B do the right (ie. "pixar@home" isn't going to be happening for a while.)
All the kind of effects that are cutting edge in games (eg. shiny bump maps) are imitations of the kind of effects that are old news in 3d rendering. - hack314, on 10/12/2007, -5/+32"Upping to HP or Sun would cut down the time tremendously, but significantly add to the cost; Something they avoid at all costs."
Avoid cost at all cost?.. woah. - mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -1/+28actually some frames required as much as 90 hours.. this is a huge improvement
http://www.pixar.com/howwedoit/index.html# - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+31RTFA
- simoncoul, on 10/12/2007, -4/+29WOW, I never knew that it took so long to render each frame for CG movies.
- valona, on 10/12/2007, -6/+28It doesn't. Just fanboism. Never go for the hard facts and research when you can just mouth off about how awesome Linux is, and how Windows sucks ass. Its surprising how often it happens, and its these people who give Linux a bad name in the wider realm of computing, when it really has so much going for it.
It surprising that they used a CX700, EMC have much higher end models that have up to 256GB of memory cache mirrorred, the new Series 3 DMX models, or even the older Symmetrix models. It only scales upto about 120TB also at full capacity, so they still have to archive off that data if they want to use the CX700 again. - dggeek, on 10/12/2007, -5/+26They're talking CPU hours. If you've got a cluster of computers working on it, the real-time hours is much less.
Still, a huge improvement. FYI, problem was solved by switching from an NFS file system to SAN. - Winters, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21Saying "Shaved 9 Hours" doesnt really do the story justice. What if it shaved 9 off and got it down to 250. What they did was bring it from 10 to 1. That's amazing.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21The poster doens't seem to have read the article. A move from NFS to SAN has nothing to do with whether or not they used linux. NFS is horrid for such beefy applications, and SAN is great for them. Since the slowness problem was with NFS, who cares what's actually rendering each frame?
That said, I've found FreeBSD's implementation of NFS to be nothing short of lovely. - Hawk2007, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21yup, I think some frames in Shrek or Shrek 2 took nearly 30 hours for a single frame.
- Silencer7, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20The story that hit the Digg frontpage the other day said it was complicated mostly from all the raytracing--you have dozens of very detailed shiny metal cars in some scenes, all reflecting the other dozens of shiny metal cars and perhaps even the reflections on those.
...this is why if the Matrix were real, it'd probably crash every time someone walked into a hall of mirrors... - richardiscool, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Maybe he's just Australian?
And he just goes up at the end of every sentence?
Like everything's a question? - scottauth, on 10/12/2007, -9/+21Too bad they couldn't shave off the scenes involving Larry the Cable Guy. Ugh...
- gordyf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Why are you asking us?
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11No. It takes their entire farm an hour to crank out a single frame. If you read the article, it took 2,300 CPU years to render the whole movie.
At 24 frames/sec for a 90 minute movie, you're looking at 129,000 frames.
2,300 CPU years / 129,000 frames = 6.5 CPU days per frame.
So. Again: a single CPU would take 6.5 days to render a single frame. As such, clearly, the article cannot possibly be claiming that a single cpu could render a frame in 1 hour, or 10. Those *must* be the numbers for the entire farm as a whole. - donsmith, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12I know we all know it but....
Pixar CEO = Steve Jobs of Apple. Pixar uses Dells!!?? How funny is that? Maybe that's why Apple moved to Intel; Steve was sick of buying Dells at his other company :) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13SAN is awesome, we have a $16M SAN cluster in our datacenter.
//Doesn't work for Pixar. - geminem, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9a couple of days ago i thought it took even longer to render Cars. i remember seeing a digg front page story that it took them 17 hours to render each frame.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Time to change your icon then.
- Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Which is it? 10Hrs http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/How_Pixar_shaved_9_hours_frame_off_rendering_Cars or 17Hrs http://www.digg.com/movies/CARS_17_hours_per_FRAME_using_3,000_computers.
I'd be more inclined to believe the 10Hrs since it came as a quote from Greg Brandeau, Pixar's VP of technology, when the 17hrs claim is just some random fact posted on rottentomatoes.com with no person claiming to have said it. - solidcube, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8If that were true, they would have called it PreVisMan.
- Jetfire, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Ok is it 10 Hours, 1 Hour or 17 Hours like yesterdays Digg said?
http://www.digg.com/movies/CARS_17_hours_per_FRAME_using_3,000_computers. - Nougat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Interview last night on NPR with the director (whose name escapes me): average time per frame is 17 hours.
- javiel, on 07/08/2008, -2/+10Who cares what kind of computer they use. As long as they get the job done im fine, cause i wana see the movie.
- finalmillenium, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7*drool* I want to play with that.
- javiel, on 07/08/2008, -1/+8The work and rendering pays off. The movies are excellent in CG quality and Physics. They also have good movie scripts. Awesome job Pixar!
- sremick, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12"Also, bare in mind..."
Ok... so who am I imagining naked again?
Wait... did you mean "bear in mind"? - somerandomnerd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Wow- different reports on how long a frame takes to render? It's almost as if not all of the hundred thousand odd frames were identical, isnt' it?
How odd. - pornel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6See HD version at apple.com/trailers - it's quite nice.
- sambowatkins, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8@Lionhart
Not a vice city reference, its a Simpsons reference (The one were Homer goes in to space) - shaun944, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@somerandomnerd
actually you're wrong. In the case of rendering, you can have multiple machines working on the same frame, or in fact elements of that frame. Its as simple as multi-threading. Even back in the day we could have a multi-proc system working on one frame or have each CPU handle a separate frame at the same time. User's choice.
Render times are high because of anti-aliasing, true motion blur, reflection, refraction, radiosity, fresnel effects and about a million other things.
I have a bachelors in fx/3D graphcis and when I was in school I used to use my friend's house (he's a network engineer) and his 6 computers as a mini-render farm. Even the small animations I did would still take 10+ hours to render a minute or two scene of CG, and that was only at most in 640x480 resolution. Film is done in 2K or 4K res, and don't forget that every doubling of the resolution means there are 4 times the amount of data. - mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5you're wrong. i've seen the trailer and it looks incredible.
- oldcrow, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I think they're using Dells because if they used Macs, some jerk would probably start screaming about unfair favoritism.
- crossthread, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Jobs is CEO of Pixar. He doesn't *own* it.
- Lenin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Pixar chooses Dell and Linux because it is much easier to make programs and customize it to work exactly as you want. Pixar makes its own rendering programs that they use because there is nothing on the market that can do the stuff they do at the scale and quality they need. Mac clusters don't allow the flexibility they need.
It takes so much time to render stuff because there are so many things to consider. For example, to make one frame you;
1) need to first render the 3D shape of an object, depending on the complexity of the object this this normally the fastest of the rendering steps. Pixar creates entire worlds inside of the computer. just look around right now and notice all the objects around you, now when you have a racetrack or an open area, imagine having to render each person, car, tree, blade of grass, etc.
2)Then you have to add texture to those objects. this can be very time consuming. because each object can have many textures attached to it.
3) the light source; this is what consumes probably 70-95% of the time it takes to render and object. because light does not only come from 1 point ( sun or light bulb), it actually bounces off things and comes at you from all directions. A good rendering program will take a ray of light from a light bulb, bounce it off a wall, then of the road, then to the bumper of the car, and then to the camera. Not only that, but you have to consider that things reflect only certain colors, so a while light bouncing off a green wall to a wet road will make the road look greenish.
therefore to render just 1 pixel you need a combination of an almost countless amount of variables that will determine the exact color.
this is only the quick and dirty version of what it takes to render a frame. there is so much more involved. - dhughes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5 ...and 1 second of a film has 24 frames, and a movie is usually an hour or two in length!
- DougJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4John Lasseter said they averaged 17 hours of rendering per frame on Cars.
See link for the radio interview.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5471976 - KChambers, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8And we've all seen the devestating effects of smug.
- deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The Cliff notes of this article: "The NFS caches couldn't go fast enough -- they did not have enough RAM on them"
- Kickersny, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Agret: "Actually it's 25fps"
Wrong. The poster said /film/ is 24 fps, which is true. The PAL video format is 25 fps, whereas NTSC is roughly 29.97 fps (it is actually 1001/30000, but is often rounded to 29.97 for simplicity). - 15charmaxwtf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"in Brandeau's view, a single CPU would have to run for 2,300 years in order to do all the number crunching for this movie."
Yea, rather lucky they don't have a single one :) - Permanent4, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6But does it play Doom?
- gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Remember that they buy hardware for a project, then that project takes several years to complete. Also, bare in mind, that when the most recent projects (including CARS) were started, Apple didn't have any real sort of servers, and that Apple had only just shipped OS X, and got Steve Jobs as the CEO, and all of Pixar's software ran on other *nix OSes.
- brufleth, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I was actually going to comment that any Linux they're using is about as similar to your vanilla desktop Linux as apples to polar bears but it looks like that's all beside the point.
- PayneX, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Pixar@Home anyone?
- DCstewieG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Does anyone know what resolution they render? Or the resolution of Cinema DLPs? I'm looking at TI's website and all I see is 2.1 million pixels, but that seems low. Do they really only display 1080p on a screen that huge?
- jetblackstrat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4"You stay classy San Fransico?"
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