Vanguard Animation has purchased high-performance server technology from SGI to create the computer animation for “Space Chimps,” a new 20th Century Fox feature film to be released in 2008.
The company purchased 10 SGI Altix XE310 servers with 64GB RAM and four Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running Red Hat Linux Fedora Core 5. The SGI system manages the multimegabyte image files throughout the workflow process of creating the 80-minute animated comedy.
Earlier, Vanguard found that it didn’t have sufficient processing power with its older server farm to move and render the large, finely detailed, HD files generated by Renderman, the animation rendering software running under the Linux OS.
For the project, animations are created in Maya, whose files are typically several megabytes in size. It was not uncommon to have hundreds of frames in a shot, starting with a 10MB Maya scene file and generating 100 or 200 multimegabyte image files.
Using SGI’s Altix XE310 servers, the producers gained a 20 percent to 30 percent improvement in speed, largely due to the server’s 3GHz processors. The largest expense on any CG production is labor, so the higher speed rendering reduced personal costs, the company said.
For more information, visit www.sgi.com.
