Shrek and Crew Return with Realism

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Rich Tate

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eWeek has a story about the latest Shrek movie and the advances of special effects that were used in the film.

Instead of months, these scenes were created in days and hours by leveraging the increased computing power. In addition, animators were able to add more realistic movement to water, fire and magic scenes, said Leonard.
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"Shrek the Third" required 20 million render hours (compared to five million for Shrek and 10 million for Shrek 2) and, at peak production, almost 4,000 AMD64 processors in the renderfarm were dedicated to that task, said Scott Miller, principal systems engineer at DreamWorks Animation.
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You forgot the part where they say AMD64. That's some good advertising for AMD, with a real world example of it's processor's capabilities.
 
"This technology is giving them a competitive advantage in the creation of movies over Pixar,"
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LOL, Dreamworks wishes they could be shown be in the same room as Pixar. Shrek 3 is the same drab rendered characters and stiff animation as the first 2 wrapped around a pisspoor story. At least Pixar ups the ante graphically for every film and even that is only a passenger to the real driver, the story.
 
Why aren't they using GPU's to do the work? A few few dozen X1900 would do things much faster IMO.
 
Hypernova said:
Why aren't they using GPU's to do the work? A few few dozen X1900 would do things much faster IMO.
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Probably not enough precision and how would a consumer card handle gigabytes of textures and insanely high polygon counts?

The G90 is supposed to support double precision (64-bit) shaders later this year and i'm sure AMD has plans to follow eventually.
 
That must have been some processing power. Seems like all these studios are investing heavily into cluster computing.
 
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