Demanding special effects
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"Monsters Vs Aliens" features monsters that evolve like liquids, with arms and mouth that disappear and a body that becomes transparent etc... Thanks to several hundreds of HP xw8600 workstations that were used, DreamWorks Animation managed to create those special effects which are particularly demanding in terms of calculation power.
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Rendering base
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Also, they used several HP ProLiant servers, able to operate in a coordinated way the treatment of animation sequences. Finally thanks to the power of this equipment, DreamWorks Animation could benefit from a number of mobile movie cameras that was much higher than for previous films. Interesting comparison: "Monsters Vs Aliens" required more than 40 million hours of computer treatment to realize more than 8 times the content of the first "Shrek" and nearly twice as much the content of "Kung Fu Panda"...
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3D challenge
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In order to take full advantage of the capacities offered by 3D, DreamWorks Animation had to modify its production process and conception tools: stereoscopic movies require e.g. to dissociate the images dedicated to your left eye from those dedicated to your right eye. This constraint of separate rendering considerably increases the number of pixels to be treated, and logically the demands on the workstations increase simultaneously.
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Exploits and figures
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- Treatment of separate rendering on nearly 100 TB of data stored on discs
- Treatment of separate rendering for more than 30 sequences of the movie, which would have taken more than 1000 years on a standalone workstation
- Creating one of the most sophisticated sequences of the film, namely flying over a city, its houses, hills and trees. In this sequence, the trees in the background had to be distributed on more than 300 layers to be treated separately.
- Staging an explosion in one of the battle scenes, which alone required more than 3 TB of drive space.
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