Tour notes - Pixar part 5: The Render Farm

You'd think the render farm would be a highlight of the tour, but as the tour went on I recognized that technology is not what drives Pixar. It's just a means to an end. So even though I'm sure there was some good stuff said at the render farm I didn't pay as much attention because there weren't a whole lot of life lessons there.

I can say I was expecting a much bigger render farm. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of 8-core units packed into that room. But it's not like it was the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark or anything. Just an average-sized room with probably 20 or 30 server racks in it.

One thing I do remember from this part of the tour had to do with render times. As many people know, the "rule of thumb" render time hasn't changed much over the years - one hour per frame. As computing technology improves, filmmakers just push the envelope that much more. There is a certain flow and schedule to producing CGI, and the hour-per-frame standard keeps everything on schedule.

Anyway, he mentioned that the longest render they'd had up to that time was on "Finding Nemo", specifically the scene with a big blue whale. I haven't seen it in a while, but apparently there's a bunch of krill and "stuff" in the water, and all of those calculations took a ridiculous amount of time to render. I have to check with some of the other guys on the tour, but I doubt they'll remember. But for some reason 180 hours comes to mind. At any rate, whatever the time was, with 24 frames per second there was A LOT of processing going on for that scene.