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GONZALO RUEDA
Improving productivity on Planet 51
Today, the technology required to create computer-generated images in the production of motion pictures has become a competitive differentiator for cutting edge organizations such as Ilion Animation Studios. As part of this advanced infrastructure, deploying a high performance storage solution allows artists to create more revisions by dramatically accelerating render farm output — fueling extraordinary productions on schedule while reducing costs. SNS Europe talks to Gonzalo Rueda, Chief Technology Officer at Ilion.
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Ilion Animation Studios was founded in 2002 to create state-of-the-art computer animated movies for worldwide theatrical release using its own purpose-built, cutting- edge technology. Based in Madrid, Spain, Ilion delivered Europe’s largest animation launch with the release of “Planet 51.” Premiering to a worldwide audience, and with distribution on 3800 screens in the United States alone, “Planet 51” is a defining production for Ilion as the studio’s first full-length feature film. Given the importance of the project to the company’s future, the management team realized that selecting the right storage partner was critical to their success.
The Challenge Gonzalo Rueda, Ilion’s Chief Technology Officer with responsibility for all technical functions at the studio, quickly came to realize the importance of a high performance NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution in enabling the creative potential of the studio’s 200 artists. This team was dependent on over 200 Hewlett Packard workstations and a render / compositing farm consisting
of over 300 physical nodes and 2500 cores. A proprietary, in-house rendering application and home-grown asset management system enabled file access. Also, Ilion ran applications such as Nuke, Autodesk Maya and 3D Studio Max on the farm. Toward the end of the project, production was moving at such an intense pace at times that Gonzalo’s team had to balance rendering and compositing work between the same physical server assets. On weekends, idle workstations were added to provide a total of 4000 cores of processing power.
This
environment posed a number of challenges: Intense pace of production schedule demanded a file storage system that could handle over 3000 simultaneous file interactions when rendering a scene in addition to providing extremely high bandwidth for compositing.
Ability to manage large shared file systems and corresponding folders was critical.
Since varied applications employed were running on both Windows and
Linux based servers, concurrent support for NFS and CIFS protocols without degradation was a clear requirement.
Cost considerations required scaling the deployment in phases to balance cost without compromising performance.
Gonzalo Rueda explains just how important a part the IT solution had to play in the making of the Planet 51 film: “There are some interesting issues with the feature film production environment. On the one hand most of our production files contain references to other files. For example, one of our lighting files which we send to compute frames on the farm will reference anywhere from 300 to 3000 external files in the form of textures and geometry caches. One of the implications of these dependencies between files is that in our environment the changing the paths of where our files live is considered data corruption since all the files that depend on them will no longer work correctly. This is where having a nice and scalable storage
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM SUMMER 2010
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