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.