>Just a piece of random info:
>Toy Story was done on SUN workstations. Why Sun? Supposedly, the workstations were
>physically smaller and cheaper for the same power. They had something like 300 in a big
>room, and then one big workstation in the middle handing out the rendering tasks. A big
>distributed system.
Exactly. Random info. We've been through this before, but since you apparently missed that discussion, here it is: Pixar used approx. 200 inexpensive, low-end, commodity, graphics-less workstations GIVEN to them by Sun so they could get their name in the film credits. Render farm only. The creative work was done by real humans using SGI graphics workstations, bought with real money by Pixar.
Pixar has purchased 60 Octanes for production of their next feature length animation, Bugs. The same old render farm will probably do just fine today however, if they want lightning-fast,
single frame, film resolution test renders, then they may want to consider an Origin2000 in addition for sheer parallel processing power!! Actually, there may be a market for inexpensive remarketed Challenge Servers for that task. SGI's last generation still blows away the competition!
Hippster |
