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[non-Blender]: Disney rendered its new animated film on a 55,000-core supercomputer

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Engadget talks to the team behind Disney's new movie, 'Big Hero 6'.

Disney's upcoming animated film Big Hero 6, about a boy and his soft robot (and a gang of super-powered friends), is perhaps the largest big-budget mash-up you'll ever see. Every aspect of the film's production represents a virtual collision of worlds. The story, something co-director Don Hall calls "one of the more obscure titles in the Marvel universe," has been completely re-imagined for parent company Disney. Then, there's the city of San Fransokyo it's set in -- an obvious marriage of two of the most tech-centric cities in the world. And, of course, there's the real-world technology that not only takes center stage as the basis for characters in the film, but also powered the onscreen visuals. It's undoubtedly a herculean effort from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and one that's likely to go unnoticed by audiences.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

21 Comments

      • I don't believe this can be done in Blender. The quality of the renderer is far better than Cycles even. They do use a lot of SSS (subsurface scattering) it seems.

    • Well I'm trying, I just need to save up enough money for a supercomputer. I found a dollar and eighty-five cents in my couch yesterday, this might take a while. ;)

    • This movie is way more complex than you're realizing here. Did you actually read the article?

      San Fransokyo contains around 83,000 buildings, 260,000 trees, 215,000
      streetlights and 100,000 vehicles (plus thousands of crowd extras
      generated by a tool called Denizen). What's more, all of the detail you
      see in the city is actually based off assessor data for lots and street
      layouts from the real San Francisco. As Visual Effects Supervisor Kyle
      Odermatt explains, animating a city that lively and massive simply would
      not have been possible with previous technology. "You couldn't zoom all
      the way out [for a] wide shot down to just a single street level the
      way we're able to," he says.

  1. Matthieu Barbié on

    LOL, some movies, 3D of course, not need this level of cpu core... Just disney had money to spend in... And I know about this... I'm working on 3D movies... for the shading/lighting/rendering/compositing departments... And yes, if you work hard, you can do this on Blender. Also, the rendering engine for this movie is not full raytraced (our current rendering engine for movie yes). Excuse me but 16 hours for 1920x1080 image... there're something wrong, for one eyes our engine need only 2h30...

    • Matthieu Barbié on

      Just for info, on current movie, we have 32 gb per computer, dual xeon, so 24 cores. A shot containt 8 gb of geometries (baked in our propritary format) and 22 gb of udim texture + fur + instances and co...

      • And there is no GPU in that supercomputer :-P
        But yeah, no need to have such excessive measures., that is just good to waste money and to have a big mediatic impact. That's all.

    • It's not only Disney check the list of the top 500 supercomputer you will find a lot of vfx companies listed on there Weta, Sony, ILM etc and it has been like this for a long time and the are usually a few in the top 50 of that list. I think this is pretty much standard for movies with 200million USD budgets.

  2. Gross. I always detest these posts where a company boasts of its wild excesses, when its same-old output never justifies the hype. If you'd made the same movie in many countries around the world, where budgets and efficiency matter, they'd probably have done it with 5GB of textures on 50 nVidia GPUs and you'd never notice the difference.

  3. Wow, it's a super-duper computer. But the question is this one: is better to the world if there are softwares that needs this kind of machine, inaccessible to most of people? Or it's better if we have a world with democratic softwares, that works in our computers, in order to allow common people to express themselves artistically? Ok, we have space for both options. Here in São Paulo it's happening a Blender course in SESC (Commerce Social Service) with almost 100 subscribers. Now this is democratic, in my opinion.

      • Blender's renders can need this kind of machine.
        BH6's renderer can need computer that everybody have at home.
        There is just a problem of optimisations, budget, waste of money to show that they are the most powerfull, ...
        You can do a render in Cycles with 1,000 bounces and 15,000 samples.
        But there will be a waste of computing time, as a 500 samples and 8 bounce render will be enough.

    • This movie isn't about making software or hardware accessible to people. It's about a company producing a 3D movie as fast as possible, because they're in a business. People shouldn't confuse this news as some sort of cause, nor as some comparative against an effort of democratic/open software. The use of supercomputers is a practical matter. Go to any major movie studio, and they're using supercomputers and large render farms for faster high-quality production. Also, the everyday hobbyist and small-business professional aren't who they're trying to impress--it's other major studios, the people in their industry.

  4. Wow, I think a lot of you have missed the point. This is news just to cater to those who might find it interesting. It's not a statement made against the likes of open software or mere bragging rights. Engadget interviewed Disney about the technology behind their movie, for those techies and geeks out there who so enjoy this kind of stuff. And by what the article reveals, the movie merits the technology.

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