Siggraph

Here’s a bit more from yesterday’s meeting with SGI’s ever gracious Louise Ledeen and PipelineFX’s Eric Solituro, senior vp of engineering. Louise’s comment that SGI recently decided to re-enter the rendering business had caught me by surprise, so I wanted to give a little detail about that change of direction.

I thought SGI had left the rendering market for good, driven out by the low cost, off-the-shelf PCs and blade servers of the world.

But only a few months ago, SGI decided to have a go at it again. As mentioned in an earlier posting, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was encouraged in part by the price/performance numbers delivered by its new Altix XE servers (based on Intel’s latest generation of Xeon dual-core processors). Also in the mix: the interest expressed by engineers at high-end facilities for pairing the cost effective hardware with software that could better handle batch queuing, distributed processing, and render farm management.

SGI feels that PipelineFX’s Qube! product can deliver that.

Earlier on, I didn’t know that reason there is a PipelineFX revolves around the valuable intellectual property held by defunct Square Pictures. That Honolulu facility famously burned through wads of money on its way to delivering Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the breakthrough feature animated film (Sony Pictures/2001).

Seems Square’s coders developed some well-regarded techniques to handle the massive processing and rendering chores needed to pull off that pioneering effort. The highly realistic, though stylized, CG characters came to the screen by dint of lots of hard-working artistic talent, competent software, and the lashing together of some 167 SGI Octane workstations, along with heavier SGI iron such as Origin 200 servers, Origin 2000 servers, refrigerator-sized Onyx2 systems…you get the idea–lots of cash expended in an attempt to pull off a top notch job on a tight schedule.

(You may be among those who marveled at the flowing ‘Breck Girl’ hair of Final Fantasy’s heroine, quite an accomplishment at the time. Unfortunately for the studio, it was about the only thing most people remembered upon leaving the theater.)

PipelineFX includes several principals from the original production facility, along with some key IP. The lessons learned include a set of concepts on how best to handle the render workflow process, moving the repetitive tasks of handling iteration offline so that artists can keep working while those assets are being processed, says Solituro. (The product plugs into the leading modeling and rendering apps including Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Studio, Avid XSI (Softimage), Mental Images mental ray, and Pixar Renderman).

SGI makes money by selling its Altix XE servers and PipelineFX’s software as a complete package, including service and upgrades. This pre-configured ‘renderfarm in a box’ approach makes things easier for engineer-deficient facilities. The software, meanwhile, is a lot cheaper than you might imagine, enough so that a number of schools and universities are now buying into the combo for use by their graphics and animation departments, according to Ledeen.

Why? Since it’s now easier to control and track render farm usage, bottlenecks are easier to spot (e.g. you can document the problem if everyone starts to render at 10pm, bogging down the whole system). Metrics are also easier to generate, something beancounters like. That in turn might allow both schools as well as animation studios to make the case for added hardware.