I suspect the world would be better if that percentage were even greater.
How Pixar Made Cars
If you want some information about how Pixar made Cars, check out the comments on this thread on Digg. True, most of them are completely incorrect, but probably at no greater rate than the commercial news media.
Addendum: when you see totals like “17 hours per frame”, they almost certainly (and in this case do) refer to rendering a single frame on a single machine. Cars runs 1:56:00 long or so, at 24 frames per second. If we accept the 17 hours per frame, that’s 167,000 frames or so, which works out to 324 years of rendering for a single machine. Assuming 3000 machines, that’s about 40 days of rendering continuously.
This presumes that the frames are rendered only once (unrealistic) and that you can achieve 100% utilization (also likely unrealistic) and that all the machines are dedicated to the one production (also unrealistic).
Shameless plug: Cars opens tomorrow. Go out and see it. Sadly, this is the first Pixar feature which doesn’t have my name in the credits. I’m over it. Really.
[tags]Cars,Pixar,Pixar Animation Studios,Computer Graphics[/tags]
Addendum2: I fixed the broken link.
Addendum3: The SFgate review was suprisingly ambivalent, but ended up with the guy sitting in the seat and smiling.
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Time 6/13/2006 at 6:17 pm
. Sorry. I don’t know if I ever came across a magazine, but the concept sounds interesting. Mark VandeWettering, Pixar’s technical director, has a blog site called BrainWagon. In a brief post, he discusses one of thetechnical aspects of the movie’s production history and debunks an entire thread at DIGG (not a reliable source of information, in my opinion). For those of you who like apples (or at least apple-shaped things, if you don’t find them disgusting), Apple got a product plug