Nvidia: Quadro Helped ILM Animate Rango
ILM used around 450 Quadro-based workstations to shorten the production time of Rango.
Wednesday Nvidia said that Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) used Quadro GPUs to help render Rango, the just-released CGI-animated movie from Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon. Approximately 450 ILM Quadro workstations were used in both the San Francisco and Singapore studios to help overcome production demands and timeline challenges.
"Whenever you're approaching a film of this scale you need to make your production pipeline operate as efficiently as possible -- especially when it comes to character animation work," said Tim Alexander, VFX supervisor for Rango. "By using Nvidia Quadro processors and building GPU-accelerated processes into our workflow, we saved a huge amount of rendering time."
In addition to using commercialized animation tools like Autodesk's Maya, the Rango team used a wide range of ILM's in-house applications including "Plume," a GPU-accelerated fluid solver/renderer that has been used on previous films like The Last Airbender and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. For Rango, the team added new shadow and lighting features into Plume for more realistic fire and dust effects.
"If we have a character standing in the key light, he'll actually cast a shadow into the dust, smoke or fire. In the past we would fake those biometric ray-type effects or any sort of shading in the composite phase," Alexander said. "By using the GPU to bake shadows and lighting into the simulation, we saved a tremendous amount of time and achieved a more realistic effect by having all of the detail of the object that's casting the shadow actually in the shadow itself."
Alexander added that the team received real-time feedback on dust and fire thanks to Quadro acceleration in Plume. This meant a reduction in time and money, as previously the same feedback would have taken days to simulate the same scene. In addition, the hundreds of GPU cores in each artist's workstation also boosted the performance of ILM's GPU render farm during off-business hours, Nvidia said.
To read the full report, head here. It's definitely interesting to see how GPUs affect not only the gaming industry, but Hollywood as well. Will this reduction in production time mean cheaper ticket prices for moviegoers? Probably not.
Got any juicy, exclusive insider news or images of prototype gadgets? Send them to kparrish at bestofmedia dot com! You can also follow my daily barrage of tech and gaming tidbits on Twitter.
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Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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zerocoolx Translation:Reply
ILM: Let's advertise for Nvidia!
Nvidia: We'll give you 450 free Quadro cards in exchange.
ILM: Hopefully this helps get people talking about this turd-fest of a movie.
Nvidia: Hopefully this will help us sell more of our overpriced cards!
SYNERGY!!!! -
lamorpa That movie had no bias toward age, race, or personality type. Pretty much everyone could find some part of it that irritated them.Reply -
mobrocket I thought the movie was decent, animation was excellent...Reply
one of the better movies so far of 2011...
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rhino13 Rango was sooo bad.Reply
Clearly would have been helped by going with AMD.
Wait, what were we talking about? -
fayzaan rhino13Rango was sooo bad.Clearly would have been helped by going with AMD.Wait, what were we talking about?Reply
We was talking about the Quadro! I findeth this funnies...o well, atleast I got warned not to watch this movie, iz crap i hears! -
zerocoolx @rhino13Reply
Attention trolls:
Following comment is made of silica. DO NOT EAT.
You're missing the point. This isn't an article. It's an ad and rational people with realistic budgets would definitely go FireGL all the way. There's no excuse for the Quadro series being so damn expensive. Cost vs performance is what the majority of people care about. ILM can choose to ignore all that and use whatever they want to use, but why am I hearing about it?
Oh right, because this is yellow journalism at it's best. Why must I limit my comments to what you want to hear? It's still on topic. In fact it's more on topic than your comment and, in a way, the article itself!