The Movie Avatar...

[Jaws]

Before reading the next post guess how many processor cores were used for the visual effects.

[Jaws]

Saw this posted on LI by ss11:
http://linuxinternationals.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3083

... The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film. To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores. The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage, and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage. To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29#Visual_effects

[freddyp]

Its like imagining I have a billion dollars..........my mind can't comprehend those numbers.

[rji]

Weta does some of the most realistically shaded hair I've ever seen, but their pipeline isn't linux only.  All of the models were sculpted in zBrush on Windows. 

[lunoob]

Industrial Light and Magic - BIG GNU/Linux user.


http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6011

[rji]

You'll be hard pressed to find any large vfx/animation studio that isn't using linux somewhere, usually Red Hat.  It is thanks to those studios that you could purchase Dell workstations with Red Hat preloaded long before Canonical's much hyped deal.

[3dz]

Now I got to rent the movie. 

[MeeMaw]

Now I got to rent the movie. 

The special effects were awesome.

 

[rji]

It looked like $500,000,000.00, but the story is juvenile, shallow, and possibly offensive.