Star Wars Gets Intel Inside

Lucas's special effects firm chooses Pentium 4 to power newest animation projects.

Tom Mainelli, PCWorld.com

If Jar Jar Binks gets too much screen time in the next Star Wars, blame Intel.

Special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic--the company that generates the aliens that spring to the screen from the mind of George Lucas--is rolling more Intel-based products into its animation labs. The company says it has already deployed more than 600 Pentium 4-based workstations in the last 18 months.

The company's animators will use these powerful new PCs to create magic for upcoming flicks such as Star Wars Episode III, The Hulk, Terminator III, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Pixels Sub For People

Since the time ILM worked on Star Wars Episode I, its in-house computing power has literally tripled, says Cliff Plumer, chief technology officer. But instead of using all that power to create animations in less time, ILM has used the extra juice to create significantly more complex works, he says.

"The complexity of shots in Clones was two to three times more difficult than what we did in Episode One," Plumer says. "What we did with cloth and skin and hair [in Clones] far exceeded what we did in Episode One."

The more powerful systems have opened even more possibilities for the director, too, he says. For example, when Lucas may have needed to use a stunt double for some scenes in Episode One, now his animators have the power to create virtual stunt doubles. That makes it possible to create scenes too dangerous for a real person to perform, he says.

And with today's notebook computers more powerful than ever, special effects wizards can actually offer directors rough renderings of special effects scenes right there on the set, Plumer adds.

Pentium systems have become more powerful and faster, so general use PCs can handle tasks that previously required specialized systems, according to ILM. The special effects firm used to rely almost entirely on proprietary systems from Silicon Graphics. ILM's new Intel workstations from Dell cost about 80 percent less than those specialty machines, Plumer says.

Chip Farm Builds Power

In addition to workstations, Intel is finding its way into other animation-related computers, says Ralph Biesemeyer, sector manager at Intel digital media. The processors are more frequently driving what the industry calls rendering farms.

These rendering farms are made up of 800 or 900 pizza box-sized PCs, clustered together and connected via Gigabit Ethernet, Biesemeyer says. Software from Alias/Wavefront and other developers parses out the instructions to the farm of PCs, which generate an animation's surfaces, lighting, and movements in a frame-by-frame environment.

Such farms enable animators to complete complex rendering tasks in much less time than in the past, Biesemeyer says.

In addition to P4 systems, animators are using Intel's Xeon processor and its new Itanium II chip, Biesemeyer says. The P4s appear in single-chip setups, but Xeons can be installed in dual, four-way, and even eight-way configurations, he says.

Using dual-Xeon motherboards lets you stack as many as 160 processors in a single seven-foot rack, creating a powerful computing center, he says.

ILM has its own rendering farm, composed of more than 1000 processors (including some SGI and AMD chips), according to Plumer. At night the company uses a proprietary scheduling application to also roll in the 600 workstations and all the other PCs in its office, including those used for simple administrative tasks.

In the wee hours of the morning, ILM has more than 2000 processors hard at work creating the digital images you'll see in upcoming movies.