M+E Daily
M&E Journal: Streamlining Processes – Server Solutions Power 3D Animation
Story Highlights
By Janet Bartleson, Director, Dell
To captivate their audience, mischievous Surly Squirrel and his rat friend Buddy need to be rendered in eye-popping detail. ToonBox Entertainment deploys Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers in its render farm to help deliver world-class 3D animation.
Toronto-based ToonBox Entertainment hit the ground running — the company’s first original TV production “Bolts & Blip” is one of the world’s first 3D stereoscopic animated television series. But stereoscopic animation places extremely heavy demands on workstations and servers in the render farm. When ToonBox prepared to start stereoscopic animation for its film The Nut Job, the company sought new studio space and a hardware vendor to furnish it. “It was critical to select the right vendor up front, because we were looking for a long-term solution,” says Ria Westaway, vice president of production.
“Dell treated us as their first priority. That commitment to our needs helped us make a decision relatively quickly.” For rendering, ToonBox selected Dell PowerEdge C6100 rack- mounted servers powered by Intel® Xeon® pro- cessor 5600 series. “For every animation we produce, we’re rendering twice as many frames as we would in 2D,” says computer graphics (CG) supervisor Andrew McPhillips. “Each shot in our rich and highly detailed film is comprised of dozens—sometimes even hundreds—of layers. Feature-length animated films typically have more than 1,000 shots. Because The Nut Job is 3D, we are rendering each of those shots twice, once for each eye. In this environment, the Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers have been fantastic. The PowerEdge C6100 makes a great render farm machine because it’s fast, highly configurable, and incredibly robust.
