I mentioned last month that I was interested in (and somewhat skeptical of) the Vicon motion capture technology behind the new movie of Beowulf. In fact, I haven't seen Beowulf yet myself: my wife and I decided that my twelve-year-old son wasn't ready to see it, and I haven't yet had the opportunity to go see it in adult company, given the concert for which I was preparing. I'll have to check and see whether Beowulf will still be playing in IMAX 3D this weekend.
I've recently heard from NVidia that Sony Pictures Imageworks used NVidia's professional Quadro boards to boost the creative pipeline for Beowulf. I can remember hearing a similar story from Silicon Graphics about 10 years ago: at the time, they had lowered the cost of a graphical workstation for CGI from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
That number is down by another order of magnitude, to thousands of dollars. The NVidia Quadro boards that Sony used for pre-visualization, which is the step where you figure out the composition of each scene before you do the final rendering, sell for a mere $599 and up.
What's next? Kids, be the first one on your block to create your own photo-realistic animation! (Just kidding: it's hard work.)
I also asked about the software that Sony used. "The final images were rendered with RenderMan. Shot lighting and compositing was done with Imageworks proprietary software called Katana for lighting and Bonsai for Compositing. Animation working renders were done with RenderMan and Maya, and layout images were done in MotionBuilder in real time and Maya pending the purpose."
Posted by Martin Heller on December 19, 2007 01:21 PM
