Trans RINA, Vol 153, Part C1, Intl J Marine Design, Jul - Dec 2011
The most complex feature of any boat animation is making the vessel interact with the water and vice versa. With larger vessels this isn’t a problem as the majority of animations currently released depict the vessel in a stationary position as if it were moored just off the cost somewhere, as shown in Figure.1. With smaller and higher speed vessels the complexity greatly increases as the need to create an interaction with the environment becomes more apparent in order to create a realistic animation. In particular body roll and wave and spray interaction have seen huge improvements in the last 5 years alone due to the software developments made in the movie industry (movies such as The Perfect Storm (2000), The Guardian (2006) and most recently Pirates Of The Caribbean: At Worlds End (2007)) with software companies now developing their own special tool bars and plug-ins to specially deal with fluid affects and rigid and soft body interaction.
7. HPC COMPUTING AND RENDER FARMING
In recent years software has only had the ability to render on one machine utilizing at most two CPU’s in a dual Xeon configured machine but with the developments of higher data transfer rates between computers through faster motherboards,
faster hard drives and
studio setting up its own render farm and also means that they do not have to spend huge amounts of money updating their own render farms to the latest hardware and software every few years.
8. In
order to
RENDER BENCHMARK COMPARISONS develop a benchmark comparison
for
rendering a test file of a moving ocean with breaking waves and foam, of approximately 2000 meters square was fully animated for 250 frames in Blender. This rendering process was executed on the computers specified in Table.3.
Computer 1(Windows Desktop) CPU – Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2.13GHz (4 cores) Memory – 4.0GB DDR2 @ 800MHz Hard Drive – 500GB 7200rpm sata II Graphics – Winfast 8600 GT 256MB Computer 2 (Windows Desktop) CPU – Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.67GHz (4 cores) Memory – 12.0GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz Hard Drive – 70GB VelociRaptor 10000rpm SATA2 Graphics – Radeon HD 4870 X2, 2GB
faster
network connections and ultimately the development of hyper threading technology the software manufacturer have been able to develop features in many of today’s high end software’s that allow distributed or queued rendering which allows multiple machines to work on a single image or for each machine to render one image each from an animation sequence.
With the developments and wide spread usage of CGI within the film industry a new industry and global market was born. The render farm industry is now a global multibillion dollar industry that is present in almost every country in the world. Business sectors that currently rely heavily on HPC computing are: advertising; automotive; aviation; engineering; film; medical.
Over the years render farms have progressed from simple office networks into specialist buildings filled with state of the art desktops and more recently into temperature controlled high security facilities filled with hundreds of Blade servers that run twenty four hours a day. The advent of 3D stereo viewing technology becoming popular with the film industry is a consequence of the technology becoming advanced enough for the studios to produce the special effects to a high enough standard in a short enough time expenditure.
frame and at an
Due to the ever growing demand for the latest and fastest hardware available major Hollywood studios have been out sourcing their rendering to Cloud based render farms that are often located in low taxation countries such as Mexico. This option can work out cheaper than the
Computer 3 (Mac Pro) CPU – Two 2.4GHz Intel Xeon “Westmere” (8 cores) Memory – 32.0GB DDR3 ECC SDRAM @ 1066MHz Hard Drive - 1TB 7200 rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s Graphics – ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB Computer 4 (HPC) CPU- 10 Nodes Table.3 Specification of computers benchmarked
Blender was installed on ten nodes of a HPC for testing with the option of an additional twenty being utilized if required. The
render
Computer 1
Time Per Frame
Overall Time
29.78
Minutes 7442
Minutes benchmarked are shown in Table 4.
Computer 2
6.05
Minutes 1512
Minutes
Computer 3
3.46
Minutes 866
Minutes
Computer 4
1.56
Minutes 390
Minutes
Table 4 Render process times for computers benchmarked (with foam in the animation)
acceptable
The configuration of the HPC was not optimised for the task of animating waves using Blender. Due to the calculation of the foam breaking on the waves having to be calculated for each frame and being limited to one CPU on the HPC, the actual speed of the rendering for the HPC is a lot faster, rendering each image of the ocean in an average of 27.2 seconds. The benchmark was repeated using Blender to render a 500 frame animation of a calmer ocean with no foam to avoid the bottle neck in using only one CPU to calculate the foam breaking. As this was a software dependent restriction. In comparing the results inTable.4 with those of Table.5, it can be seen
©2011: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects C-43 process times for computers
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