HP played an important role in the making of SHREK 2 as a result of its partnership with DreamWorks, allowing more cost-effective production of the instant computer-animated blockbuster.
HP's xw8000 workstations provided SHREK 2 artists with state-of-the-art dual processors and the fastest available memory. This allowed animators to see more visual detail interactively on their workstations and enabled DreamWorks to scale the complexity of the environments to give a richer, more believable world. More than 330 HP Workstations were deployed to SHREK 2 digital artists and dedicated to the interactive process of making the film.
HP's High Performance xw8000 Workstation featured:
* Red Hat Linux 7.2 OS* Dual-Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz processors* NVIDIA Quadro 4 XGL graphics card* 2GB RAM* Dual monitors
These powerful workstations helped SHREK 2 artists with:
* Interactive lighting and much faster animation turn around time. Artists received more iterations and more opportunity to create and deliver work on time and within budget.* 2 GB of RAM allowed animators to store more frames of animation. The faster speed of the processors allows those recalculated frames to have more detailed geometry, which helps the animators to pre-visualize and make decisions before sending to rendering.* The faster graphics cards in the HP xw8000 workstations make it easier to interact with the complex scenes for doing layout, positioning lights, texture mapping, deformation of characters and playback of complex geometry.
The SHREK 2 render farm was comprised of:
* 347 LP-1000 1.2 GHZ P3 dual processor servers with 2 GB of RAM* 433 ProLiant DL360 2.8 GHZ P4 dual processor servers with 4 GB of RAM
HP servers provided SHREK 2 production and technology staff the rendering resources to apply DreamWorks' newly developed computer graphics techniques including:* Subsurface scattering for more realistic skin* Global illumination for more realistic lighting* Better looking hair* More complex clothing and wardrobes than in the original SHREK* Larger crowd scenes with more complex characters than seen in the original SHREK* More complex volumetric rendering of smoke, magic and liquid effects
Portions of SHREK 2 were rendered remotely at HP Labs in Palo Alto. This extension of the DreamWorks render farm provided artists the computing power needed to complete SHREK 2 on schedule. HP provided DreamWorks the additional capacity and throughput it needed in the crunch of production. These processors gave the studio the ability to accelerate the delivery of key sequences under tight schedules.
* A total of 500 ProLiant DL360 dual processor servers were set up in the extended render farm adding another 1,000 processors to the SHREK 2 arsenal.* 20 Terabytes of data were generated. That is equivalent to all the text found in every book in the largest library in the U.S. - the Library of Congress.* More than four million programming lines of proprietary software were developed in order to create the thousands of special effects.
HP (www.hp.com) is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
