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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#171

Post by dahart »

klodolph wrote: post #3

My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…

I don’t believe the average is 24 hours of wall clock. I do think average render times have increased a bit over time, but FWIW, I think the average render time needs to be “overnight”. The shot just needs to rendered before dailies in the morning. If it takes longer than maybe 6-8 hours, it risks not being done by the next day, and that means each iteration with the director takes two days instead of one. There is significant pressure to avoid that, so when shots don’t finish overnight, people generally start optimizing.

When I was doing CG production shot work ~15 years ago, there were occasionally shots that ran 24 hours, but the average was more like 3 or 4 hours. The shots that took 24 hours or more usually caused people to investigate whether something was wrong.

I worked on one such shot that was taking more than 24 hours. A scene in the film Madagascar where the boat blows a horn and all the trees on the island blow over. The trees and plants were modeled for close-ups, including flowers with stamens and pistils, but the shot was a view of the whole island. One of my co-workers wrote a pre-render filter with only a few lines of code, to check if pieces of the geometry were smaller than a pixel, and if so just discard them. IIRC, render times immediately dropped from 24 hours to 8 hours.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#172

Post by KaiserPro »

aprdm wrote: post #167
KaiserPro wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do they provision it ex VFX sysadmin here. I'm not sure if they use their own scheduler or not. IF they do, they use tractor(might be tractor 2 now), which looks after putting the processes in the right places. Think K8s, but actually easy to use, well documented and reliable. (just not distributed, but then it scales way higher and is nowhere near as chatty) They would have a whole bunch of machines, some old…

Out of curiosity, did you move outside VFX and if yes to what industry, have you been enjoying and what motivated you? Cheers

I spent tenish years in VFX. I moved away in 2014, because the hours and pay were abysmal. I still love the industry.

I moved to a large profitable financial news paper, which had cute scaling issues (ie they were all solved, so engineers tried to find new and interesting ways to unsolved them )

I then moved to a startup that made self building machine readable maps, which allowed me to play with scale again, but on AWS (alas no real hardware). We were then bought out by a FAAMG company, so now I'm getting bored but being paid loads to do so.

Once the golden handcuffs have been broken, I'd like to go back, but only if I can go home at 5 every day...

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#173

Post by KaiserPro »

berkut wrote: post #169
KaiserPro wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do they provision it ex VFX sysadmin here. I'm not sure if they use their own scheduler or not. IF they do, they use tractor(might be tractor 2 now), which looks after putting the processes in the right places. Think K8s, but actually easy to use, well documented and reliable. (just not distributed, but then it scales way higher and is nowhere near as chatty) They would have a whole bunch of machines, some old…

Rumour in the industry is that Pixar don't use Tractor themselves, and have a custom solution in Emeryville :)

Lol, that doesn't surprise me at all. Pixar were the last of the original companies to custom make everything....

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#174

Post by KaiserPro »

dagmx wrote: post #166
KaiserPro wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's almost certainly rendered in cinema 4k (4,096 x 2,160 pixels), if not more. moreover it'll be in a 16/32bit log colourspace as well

Nobody renders higher than 4k DCI unless the film is screening on large format (imax etc). The color space will be acesCG most likely these days.

ahh smashing, I've been away for a while. I had heard rumours that they'd made a new colour standard, but I'd not actually looked into it.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#175

Post by dgrant »

mroche wrote: post #122
banana_giraffe wrote: post #95

One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance. I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code…

The entire studio is VDI based (except for the Mac stations, unsure about Windows), utilizing the Teradici PCoIP protocol, 10Zig zero-clients, and (at the time, not sure if they've started testing the graphical agent), Teradici host cards for the workstations. I was an intern in Pixar systems for 2019 (at Blue Sky now), and we're also using a mix of PCoIP and NoMachine for home users. We finally figured out a quirk w…

Hi. I used to work at Teradici. It was always interesting that Pixar went with VDI because it meant the CPUs that were being used as desktops during the day could be used for rendering at night. Roughly speaking. The economics made a lot of sense. A guy from Pixar came to Teradici and gave a talk all about it. Amazing stuff.

Interesting contrast with other companies that switched to VDI where it made very little sense. VMware + server racks + zero clients compared to desktops never made economic sense, at the time. But oftent here is some other factor that tips things in VDI's favour.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#176

Post by solinent »

klodolph wrote: post #80
solinent wrote: post #35

I'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).

They render them at a very high resolution, so perhaps the person I heard the rumors from was talking about reducing the resolution to something less than 10k by 10k (or more sometimes, I've been out of the film industry for 8 years).

I shouldn't really say more.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#177

Post by solinent »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #55
solinent wrote: post #35

I've heard rumors that Pixar used to be able to render their movies in real-time :)

I'd like to imagine that they use some old movie or short as a benchmark, that'd be neat to see the data on.

Definitely--lots of old assets are used for testing, I've seen them personally. It's standard practice to keep around old models, scenes, textures, etc.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#178

Post by selectodude »

dahart wrote: post #92
xtracto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was designed to have 280 characters max per message. This means that for this kind of long format text, the amount of Signal-to-Noise ratio of having a large number of "tweets" is pretty low. The amount of stuff your brain has to filter in the form of user name, user tweet handle, additional tagged handlers, UI menus, UI buttons for replying, retweeting, liking, etc on every single code snippet makes your bra…

Fully agree with your takeaway. Adding context on the character limit: > Twitter was designed to have 280 characters max per message. Twitter was designed to use 140 characters, plus room for 20 for a username to fix in the 160 char budget of an SMS message. Their upping it to 280 later was capitulating to the fact that nobody actually wants to send SMS sized messages over the internet.

Does Twitter even allow you to tweet via SMS anymore?

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#179

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #155
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #93

From what I understand they still seem to render at 1080p and then upsample to 4k. Judging by Soul.

it's almost certainly rendered in cinema 4k (4,096 x 2,160 pixels), if not more. moreover it'll be in a 16/32bit log colourspace as well

Have you examined it or are you guessing? Because I'd have assumed they did too but I see jagged stairsteps on the 4k stream when zooming on sharp edges.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#180

Post by joshspankit »

dahart wrote: post #165
joshspankit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s society or maybe it’s intrinsic human nature, but there seems to be an overriding “only use resources to make it faster to a point, otherwise just make it better [more impressive?]”. Video games, desktop apps, web apps, etc. And now confirmed that it happens to movies at Pixar.

You can come at this from multiple directions. On the one hand, it’s wise to only expend effort making something faster up to a point. At some point, unless a human has to wait for the result, there is no reason to make something faster [1]. On the other hand, once something takes more than a minute or two, and the person who started it goes and does something else, it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as it’…

Excellent points, but I have two counters:

- Feedback loops

- Cumulative end-to-end latency

The second is especially challenging as only a handful of coders saying “that’s good enough” can add up to perceptibly massive latency for the end user.

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