“The Painter” by Power
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2004 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 2004:
SIGGRAPH Video Review:
Track:
- 12
Title:
- The Painter
Length:
- 5:09
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- One Plus One
- Supinfocom
Description:
The story of a tiny robot artist made up of spare computer parts.Stuck in a dark and gloomy room, our little hero dreams of impossi-ble adventures turned into paintings on the walls. All that is set to change the day he summons a genie who grants him three wishes.
This four-minute film was created by 422, a UK-based, award-winning production company, in collaboration with researchers fromHP Labs, Bristol, UK. The animation was rendered using a prototype rendering service developed by HP Labs, running on an HP UtilityData Center (UDC). By tapping into large amounts of compute power on-demand, 422 was able to meet the aggressive deadline without sacrificing production values.
This collaboration demonstrates how computing resources can be assembled, organized, and managed virtually using the flexibility of the UDC, a key component of the HP Adaptive Enterprise architec-ture. It also illustrates the value of utility computing, in which an end-user taps into a large pool of virtual resources but pays only for what is used.
Hardware:
HARDWARE: PC/Intel dual 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM. Rendering farm: 104 CPUs
(ProLiant DL360s with dual 1.4 GHz PIII CPUs, 4 GB RAM, 72 GB
HD).
Software:
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER: Modeling, animation, rendering, and dynamics: Alias Maya 4.5.
Compositing: Quantel Editbox. Custom software: HP’s experimental
utility rendering service was used for rendering the film. OS: Windows
(various) for workstations, RedHat 8 Linux for rendering farm.
Additional Contributors:
Producer: Anne Farrell
Associate Producers: Stephen Hinde, Rycharde Hawkes
Rendering Service: Guillaume Belrose, Sophie Bevin, Patrick Goldsack, Julio Guijarro, John Henriksson, Paul Murray, Peter Toft, Lawrence Wilcock
3D Animators: Andy Power, Tom Downes, Duncan MacDonald, Jaime Pardo, Tia Perkins, Libby Redden
Systems Manager: Dougal Matthews
Dubbing Mixer: Steve Williams
Foley: Richard Birtwisle
Music: Kim Humphrey
Post Production: David Corfield
Executive Producer: Andy Davies-Coward
Additional Information:
PRODUCTION
Modeling: NURBS. Rendering technique used most: Maya softwarerenderer’s ray tracing. Average CPU time for rendering per frame: 22minutes. Total production time: 2.5 months. Production highlight:This film was rendered on HP’s experimental utility rendering service developed by HP Labs, Bristol, UK. Over 18,000 frames were rendered in 17 days, with the number of processors flexing from18 to 104 to meet the variable rendering demand during that period.
