Rendering Shrek@Home? 345
JimCricket writes "There's an interesting piece at Download Aborted about using distributed computing (a la SETI@Home, Grid.org, etc.) in the film industry. With the recent release of Shrek 2, which required a massive amount of CPU time to complete, one must wonder why the film industry doesn't solicit help from their fans. I'd gladly trade some spare CPU time in exchange for the coolness of seeing a few frames of Shrek 3 rendered on my screensaver!"
MPAA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:3, Interesting)
Data (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Distributed hacking? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't like how Matrix Revolutions ended? Just load up the "Smith kills us all" branch and choose your own adventure!
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
If they could find a way to offload some intermediate calculations (like deformations of hair or fabric or something that can be used as an intermediate result in a scene) then that might be a clever use for a distributed.net [distributed.net] style technique.
-fren
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Making things worse (Score:5, Interesting)
If you send the same input to three different IP addresses (extra-paranoid: use three different top-level IP blocks) and get the same result back, you can be reasonably certain that the result is valid. If there are -any- discrepancies in the images, assume that one (or more) was improperly rendered, discard all three, and try again with three new addresses.
Even should you manage to hit three different IP addresses that return the exact same 'hacked' image, it's not exactly hard for an editor to step through the movie frame-by-frame, looking for discrepancies...
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hold it there for a second (Score:3, Interesting)
Giving away CPU cycles so that a multi-million dollar company can improve its product is a wholly different thing.
Cost Cutting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Good Luck (Score:4, Interesting)
The last film I worked on, we had anywhere from 800MB to 12GB of data per frame that the renderer had to have. I am talking about compressed renderman rib archives, textures, normal maps, displacements, shadow and other maps.
The data was mostly generated at render time for things like hair and shadow maps, but if it was being distributed, there is no way to do that - they would be transferred beforehand.
Also, there are always many terabytes of data generated by the renderers for each render layer, for diffuse color, specular color, etc.
It is just not feasible to transfer all that data around, and its not like bittorrent or other p2p systems will help much with that since each frame would most likely only be rendered by a few people (for verification).
Also, the model geometry and shaders (and somtimes textures) are closely guarded secrets... In short, if a major film were ever to do somthing like this, everyone participating would need huge (> 100mbit) bandwidth and a LOT of disk space and also be under very tight NDAs.
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
So what happens when a few talented indies get their paws on the processing power required to blow the doors off of convetional actors? It won't be goodbye to Hollywood just yet but I can't wait for the first CG/Anime crossover. I can't imagine how Cowboy Bebop would fare if it didn't have the cartoon stigma.
Adverse side effect of shrek@HOME (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
The heck with that, why would they want the 3D wireframe models to get out on the net? What do people think the frames are rendered from, anyhow? I predict it would be less than one week between someone figuring out how to extract the models, and someone else making a low-res animation of those models doing the nasty with each other.
Stupidity (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone wants me to wear such advertisement-enhanced clothes, they should pay me for the priviledge.
Same with computer cycles. I pay the electricity. If they plan on making money from the product of the cycles I give them, they should pay me.
However, I have no problem giving away free computer cycles to non-profit scientific endeavors.
Distributed Computing Server (Score:1, Interesting)
It might be a good idea to have a distributed computing SERVER (DCS) that can take and serve number crunching tasks to those that request them.
Some good ideas might be the following:
Build a mesh of DCS' by using current P2P technologies so that one DCS can know about a good number of others.
DCS' initially (might) not provide services to every user by default; it is up to the owner to choose who to allow to use CPU power and how much.
--
After all, the CPU power you don't use goes wasted.
(If you're not a power saving aficionado.)
Re:The reason why..... (Score:2, Interesting)
The cost of a server farm is a small fraction of the cost of making a movie.
A close friend of mine is in charge of the server farms for a feature film animation company. For their next film they sat down and considered the hardware architecture they wanted, bought a few test machines, then said okay send us a few hundred PCs.
They didn't even care (much) how much the PCes costed, or that they might want to reuse hardware from the previous movie. For them, new movie = a bunch of new hardware - no big deal.
The way this *could* work... (Score:3, Interesting)
Secondly: Users cannot see what they have rendered. This is a given, as has been pointed out a thousand times already, this is insane from a security and PR standpoint. INSTEAD, simply let users who participate on a regular basis have access to a private forum, developer blogs, and grant them access to the official PR material slightly before it gets published. It's less cool, sure, but it could work.
Corporate Chairity? (Score:2, Interesting)
But to offload all the costly/time-consuming work and THEN let them sell it back to you 4 or 5 times (Theater, Pay-Per-View, DVD Rental/purchase) along with all the marketing tie-ins doesn't seem to make sense (to the consumer, that is. For them it's great, less equipment overhead and quicker turn-around.)
If you think that's a good idea, I've got some swampland I can sell you.
This type of thing makes absolute sense for things that might not otherwise get funding and don't derive a profit (SETI@home, Folding@home, etc.).
If you want to get paid next to nothing animating scenes for a giant studios next big movie, get a job at some asian animation house.
...a whole new world (Score:5, Interesting)
You do still need voice actors. With an animated feature, a really good voice actor can really add to the experience.
And you still need to make the character models move in realistic ways. So you need motion capture actors, or else truly skilled "puppeteers" to animate the models.
All that said, I actually agree with you. Take a look at Killer Bean 2: The Party [jefflew.com] by Jeff Lew. One guy made this, using his computer at his home. I think it's really cool that people can just make movies now with only a tiny budget.
steveha
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhh, there have already been some. The first one I've been looking for (Appleseed) is coming out in Japan soon, and it looks [apple.co.jp] quite badass. I've heard of a few crossovers before now, but can't think of any off the top of my head.
Internet Movie Project http://www.imp.org/ (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You don't have the machine for it... (Score:1, Interesting)
on your 1400X1200 screen you might get an Eye or fingernail.
think 10,000 pixels by 40,000 pixles in 32 bit color.
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:3, Interesting)
What software would "helpers" use? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, it might make sense to go to some rental service that can set up the licenses and servers and just charges per CPU hour, license hour, and MB on the server. It wouldn't be a small thing to set up, though, and it would be a professional service with strict NDAs.
Re:I had this idea a long time ago :) (Score:2, Interesting)
For Shrek, and according to Dan Wexler's statistics at http://www.flarg.com/Graphics/ShrekRenderfarm.html , on average each frame took 2GB of data. I'm not sure and won't bother to find out how much we used on Shrek 2, but of course chances are the figures are even bigger.
This alone would make it impractical, without even taking into account all the IP and copyright issues.
j
Actually, just double. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, just double. First use "Comparison Mode". If the two come back different, resolve it by switching to "voting mode", doing a third frame at a third site and seeing which it agrees with. (If all three disagree you've got a systematic problem and you need to debug the whole project.)
If there are -any- discrepancies in the images, assume that one (or more) was improperly rendered, discard all three, and try again with three new addresses.
A disagreement proves that at least one of your sites had a problem. But (unless there's some non-randomness to your selection of the three sites) the fact that ONE of your first set had a problem does NOT mean that the OTHER sites in your first set are any more likely to have misrendered than the new sites. So there's no reason to throw away the results from your first set. Just use the additional site(s) to select which one of your first set was wrong.
If a significant fraction of your sites are compromised to make identical misrenderings, you still don't want to throw away your original set. Keeping them all and going to 5, 7, 9, etc gets you closer to the likelyhood of the right answer, while discarding them and repeating a 3 site run with new sites gives you a greater probability of accepting the wrong answer.
= = = =
But all redundant systems fail if you have a systematic problem that may affect more than half of your potential samples. For instance: A virus infection that causes a systematic corruption of the rendering process (i.e. changing the texture map so the pants are transparent or carry an image of genitilia). If more than half render wrong than right, more redundancy makes you accept more wrong frames.
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen LOTR 1 and 2 and they're hillarious. You have to know Russian pretty well though to understand all the humor.
Can't wait for LOTR 3 to come out
Re:Doubt it'll happen... (Score:1, Interesting)
this way no actual creative content would leave the building.
Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
You won't see anything: cryptographic protocols... (Score:3, Interesting)
The calculations are done in encrypted values and returned as such. The host can then decrypt the result.
This sounds pretty amazing but consider addition as a starter: The host uses a one-time-pad for each number and XORs them. The client adds the encrypted numbers. When you add the numbers, the host only needs to XOR all the keys on the result and gets the true result! The client, though, knows NOTHING about the true values (the protocol is information theoretically secure), as the XOR turns them into "signal noise".
I imagine, though, that the effort of implementing this probably outweighs the benefits for a project like rendering a movie. But for truly mission-critical data, it may be worth it...
What about a buy-in project? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like imp.org (Score:3, Interesting)