In case someone is curious, the optimization they describe is trivial to do in Kubernetes - just enter a resource request for cpu without adding a limit.
Pixar's Render Farm
71–80 of 323 posts
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#72I like the picture of the 100+ SPARCstation render farm for the first Toy Story https://mobile.twitter.com/benedictevans/status/766822192197...
This reminds me of one of the first FreeBSD press releases. [0]
> FreeBSD Used to Generate Spectacular Special Effects
For the then upcoming movie The Matrix
> Manex Visual Effects used 32 Dell Precision 410 Dual P-II/450 Processor systems running FreeBSD as the core CG Render Farm.
[0]: https://www.freebsd.org/news/press-rel-1.html
edit: added that it was for The Matrix.
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#73Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?
I'm "anyone" since I know very little about the subject but I'd speculate that they've done a cost-benefit analysis and figured that would be overkill and tie them to proprietary hardware, so that they couldn't easily adapt and take advantage of advances in commodity hardware.
GPUs are commodity hardware, but you don't have to speculate, this was answered well here:
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing to me that people find twitter difficult to read... I mean it's not perfect but it's not an ovaltine decoder ring, either. Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" You're human; THE most adaptable creature known. Adapt! I'm not saying that twitter UX is perfect, or even good. I AM saying that it is usable.
It's very unintuitive that when you open a Thread, the "back" arrow means "back to something else" and you have to scroll up above "line 0" to see the context of the thing being replied to. I forget this every single time I open a tweet thread and try to figure out the context. Once you scroll up, it sort of makes sense -- each tweet with a line connecting user icons but then suddenly the expanded tweet thread has th…
I am not saying it is intuitive.
I'm saying it's usable.
I'm saying that complaining about it makes people look like they think they're royalty who need everything just so or their whole day is ruined... And now they can't tell the butler to take Poopsie for a walk because they're so shaken by the experience.
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#75Oh man, I wanted this to contain much more details :( Whats the hardware? How much electric energy goes into rendering a frame or a whole movie? How do they provision it (as they keep #cores fixed)? They only talk about cores, do they even use GPUs? What's running on the machines? What did they optimize lately? So many questions! Maybe someone from Pixar's systems department is reading this :)?
Not Pixar specifically but Modern VFX and Animation studios usually have a bare metal render farm, they usually are pretty beefy -- think at least 24 cores / 128 GB of RAM per node.
Usually in crunch time if there's not enough nodes in the render farm they might rent nodes connecting them to their network for a period of time, or they might use the cloud, or they might get budget to increase their render farms.
From what I've seen the Cloud is extremely expensive for beefy machines with GPUs, but, you can see that some companies use it if you google [0] [1].
GPUs can be used for some workflows in modern studios but I would bet the majority of it is CPUs, those machines are usually running a Linux distro and the render processes (like vray / prman , etc.). Everything runs from a big NFS cluster.
[0] https://deadline.com/2020/09/weta-digital-pacts-with-amazon-...
[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/dreamworks-animation-steps-to...
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#76Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?
There's a brief footnote about their REVES volume rasterizer used in Soul World crowd characters. They simply state their render farm is CPU based and thus no GPU optimizations were required. At the highest, most practical level of abstraction, it's all software. De-coupling the artistic pipeline from underlying dependence on proprietary hardware or graphics APIs is probably the only way to do it.
https://graphics.pixar.com/library/SoulRasterizingVolumes/pa...
On a personal note, I had a pretty visceral "anti-" reaction to the movie Soul. I just felt it too trite in its handling of themes that humankind has wrestled with since the dawn of time. And jazz is probably the most cinematic of musical tastes. Think of the intros to Woody Allen's Manhattan or Midnight in Paris. But it felt generic here.
That said the physically based rendering is state of the art! If you've ever taken the LIE toward the Queensborough Bridge as the sun sets across the skyscraper canyons of the city you know it is one of the most surreal tableaus in modern life. It's just incredible to see a pixel perfect globally illuminated rendering of it in an animated film, if only for the briefest of seconds ;)
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#77Can anyone comment on why Pixar uses standard CPU for processing instead of custom hardware or GPU? I'm wondering why they haven't invested in FPGA or completely custom silicon that speeds up common operations by an order of magnitude. Is each show that different that no common operations are targets for hardware optimization?
Amusingly, Pixar did build the "Pixar Image Computer" [1] in the 80s and they keep one inside their renderfarm room in Emeryville (as a reminder). Basically though, Pixar doesn't have the scale to make custom chips (the entire Pixar and even "Disney all up" scale is pretty small compared to say a single Google or Amazon cluster). Until recently GPUs also didn't have enough memory to handle production film rendering,…
That wikipedia article could be its own story!
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing to me that people find twitter difficult to read... I mean it's not perfect but it's not an ovaltine decoder ring, either. Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" You're human; THE most adaptable creature known. Adapt! I'm not saying that twitter UX is perfect, or even good. I AM saying that it is usable.
I think building a more usable alternative (or in this case using an existing one) is a better idea than adapting to Twitter's horrendous "UX".
WHY NOT BOTH?!
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#79I would love to know about some curious questions, for example: If there's a generally static scene with just characters walking through it, does the render take advantage of rendering the static parts for the whole scene once , and then overlay and recompute the small differences caused by the moving things in each individual sub frame? Or, alternatively what "class" of optimizations does something like that fall in…
> If there's a generally static scene with just characters walking through it, does the render take advantage of rendering the static parts for the whole scene once
From the detail of rendering they do, I'd say there's no such thing.
As in: characters walking will have radiosity and shadows and reflections so there's no such thing as "the background is the same, only the characters are moving" because it isn't.
Re: Pixar's Render Farm
#80I've heard rumors that Pixar used to be able to render their movies in real-time :)
From what I understand, this was never the case, and not even close. Toy Story took a ton of compute power to render (at the time), Soul took a ton of compute power to render (at the time).