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Millimeter"Rango" Rides Into the Wild West With NVIDIA Quadro
Apr 28, 2011 12:36 PM
Approximately 450 Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) artists located in San Francisco and Singapore worked on “Rango,” the new Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon animated film directed by Gore Verbinski. Each artist was on a workstation equipped with NVIDIA Quadro solutions, where they benefited from the speed of the graphics processing unit (GPU) when using animation tools such as Autodesk Maya, along with a range of ILM's in-house applications.
ILM's proprietary GPU-accelerated fluid solver/renderer "Plume" has been used on several films, including “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Last Airbender.” For “Rango,” new shadow and lighting features were built into Plume to make dust and fire simulations more realistic, contributing to the unique look of the environments envisioned for the film.
“Rango's” crowd scenes feature up to 120 variations of 75 key characters — each one with hair, fur or feathers on their body. In order to accommodate the massive amounts of rendering required to generate the frames, ILM developed a GPU-accelerated process to calculate lighting occlusion. The occlusion data provided a preview of hair or feathers, and was fed into Pixar's RenderMan renderer for a final pass. The pipeline shortcut resulted in speed increases of up to 100 times.
Furthermore, with "ObaQ," ILM's Academy Award-winning render queue system, NVIDIA processors were automatically utilized by the render system when an artist logged out at the end of the workday, boosting the performance of the GPU render farm during off-business hours.
The first fully animated feature film by ILM, “Rango” was released in theaters on March 4, 2011 and rocketed to the top box office spot in its opening weekend.
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