Moviemakers on a quest for their real-time 3D Holy Grail

The majority of what Howard calls "traditional 3D work" at Framestore uses the software package Maya, with some XSI mixed in. Both owned by AutoDesk, these suites of software tools are used for creating computer-generated characters and objects, often in conjunction with conventionally filmed 2D. Even the scenery. "Look at the Harry Potter movies," says Prescott. "Hogwarts only goes up to about 7 foot. All the environments above that are generated."

The characters

Tools like these do more than just help animators draw the characters and scenery. XSI, for instance, as well known as SoftImage afterwards the Avid subsidiary it was purchased from in 2008, has built in "inverse kinematics". This innovation solves complicated equations behind the scenes to calculate, for instance, the precise changes of angle at the thigh, the knee and the ankle to walk a character in a life-like way from A to B.

"When it comes to rendering," says Granard, "that goes to very, very large render farms made up of thousands and thousands of servers doing batch processing." Built around HP ProLiant BL460 blade innovation, there are five of these farms, geographically dispersed across the United States and India.

Cloud operation

Effectively it's a cloud operation. As a final movie like Puss In Boot amounts to around 120TB of data, that's a lot of bits to ship around. "We use HP networking," says Granard, "and it's very fast and very robust. We run at 10Gbit at core and 1GBit out to the desktop. We get out to our cloud services through 10GBit pipes with lots of redundancy."

On open industry network performance and power test for private and public data center clouds ethernet fabrics evaluating 10GbE switches.

The servers

This paper looks at cloud architecture in which the servers and networks in the data center can rapidly respond to changing demands.

Tolly test report containing an evaluation on System Networking RackSwitch G8124 including a comparison analysis against Cisco Nexus 5010.

Tolly test report - IBM System Networking RackSwitch G8264 comparison evaluation against three competing 10GbE switches.