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New cartoon "Disney" Render to 55,000 cores
City of San Fransokio 83 000 buildings, 260,000 trees, 215,000 streetlights 100 000 cars i>
A few days before the premiere of the animated film "City of Heroes» (Big Hero 6) members of Walt Disney Animation Studios had a technical presentation and declassified some of the details of this interesting project. It is interesting not only because it presents a 3D-printing, telepathically controlled swarms microbots and other technologies of the future, but because it is specially designed for this film quite unique programs.
In total, about 30 animators used programs. Some are improved versions of previous designs. But there were quite new. Chief among them - global illumination simulator called Hyperion, his team of 10 developers to create about two years.
Walt Disney Animation Studios called Hyperion most risky and ambitious animation R & D-project of all that they did. The main risk is that the Hyperion was created on the fly. The film, by and large, rendered on a beta version of the program, before its final readiness.
Hyperion includes simulation of global illumination that performs complex calculations to calculate multiple reflections indirect light from all visible surfaces. In particular, Hyperion is able to calculate 10-20 reflections that creates realistic lighting effects in the reflected light. Although most of the audience of the cartoon does not give any special significance, but the lights in reflected light - it really is a powerful thing, as such, no one had done before.
Comparison of rendering calculation of one reflection (right) and 10+ reflections (left) i>
For these calculations the Disney company needed gigantic computational power. Was involved cluster of 55,000 cores, распределённый geographically into four render farm . Especially for cluster management was written a separate program called Coda.
Power Cluster - 1, 1 million render hours a day. On the whole film (108 minutes, ie 155 520 frames) spent 190 million render hours.
To evaluate the capacity of a computer system, the staff explained that it could render the entire cartoon "Tangled" (2010) in just 10 days.
But here she had more difficult: City of heroes San Fransokio consists of 83 000 buildings, 260,000 trees, 215,000 streetlights and 100 000 cars and thousands of people, which generated another program Denizen. Tellingly, the map of the city is based on a real map of San Francisco.
Employees of Walt Disney Animation Studios say that animation is so big city is not possible on previous generations of technology.
The plot of the film is developed in the near future. The main characters - a boy and a soft vinyl Beymaks robot (and a group of his friends with supernormal). Boy Hiro Hamada - a born inventor and genius design of robots. Together with his older brother Tadashi they embody the most advanced ideas in the future of the Technical University of San Fransokio which combines the features of San Francisco and Tokyo. After a series of mysterious events friends are in the middle of an insidious plot. Desperate, Hiro decides to use cheerful and good-natured experimental robot Beymaksa, reprogram it to invincible fighting machine.
At the bottom of the frame Hiro scans robot for 3D-printing his "armor».
The plot of the film includes many futuristic details. When it was decided to create a story about the technologies of the near future, assistant director paid visits to MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Tokyo to explore the advanced developments in robotics and related fields.
For example, the moment in the film, when Hiro prints on the 3D-printer in his garage protective case for the robot, the film's producer believes reference to meykerskomu DIY-movement, which is gaining popularity worldwide.
Soft robot Beymaks also has a real prototype. In particular, some hospitals are now used in Japan robots for patient care. They have something similar appearance, although they are not made of vinyl and plastic.
Swarms of mini-drones taken from research projects at Carnegie Mellon University. Although the version of the cartoon, of course, more fantastic than the existing prototypes now. Microbots electromagnetic signal is transmitted through the chain to each other, moving integrally. Since the swarm includes tens of millions microbots, render it too initially was not possible until involved supercomputer with 55,000 cores.
The creators believe the Big Hero 6 literally saturated with love for technology. "The film celebrates science and technology as we have never really done before," - says the assistant director Don Hall (Don Hall).
Source: habrahabr.ru/post/241171/