"Toy Story" Breaks Ground with Computer-Generated Animation

Strategic Insights -

The making of "Toy Story," the world's first full-length computer-generated animated film, was a collaborative effort between Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, leveraging Sun Microsystems' high-powered computers to render each of the 114,000 frames in the 77-minute movie. Pixar's use of a networked bank of 117 Sun workstations, dubbed the "RenderFarm," enabled the team to achieve an unprecedented amount of computing power, rendering the startlingly lifelike images that brought the movie to life. This achievement marks a significant shift in the film industry, making computer animation more affordable and accessible for filmmakers.

Key Takeaways:

  • The RenderFarm, a networked cluster of 117 Sun workstations, composed one of the most powerful graphics rendering engines ever created, with an aggregate performance of 16 billion instructions per second.
  • The RenderFarm was comprised of 87 dual-processor and 30 four-processor SPARCstation 20s, as well as an 8-processor SPARCserver 1000, all running on Sun's Solaris operating environment.
  • The use of RenderMan software on the RenderFarm allowed the team to render each of the movie's 114,000 frames, taking 800,000 computer hours to produce the final cut, with each frame requiring up to 13 hours for final processing.
  • The RenderFarm was capable of producing high-resolution final rendering, test images, and test frames in as little as a few seconds, with scalability built-in to enable upgrades without requiring additional space.
  • Pixar plans to develop a parallelized version of RenderMan, Parallel RenderMan, to further exploit Sun's SPARC/Solaris multiprocessing and multithreaded architecture.
  • The RenderFarm was assembled by Sun and Pixar engineers in less than a month and drew upon Sun's own experience in setting up "farms" of many systems linked together.

Statistics:

  • 114,000 frames were rendered for the 77-minute movie "Toy Story."
  • The RenderFarm has the aggregate performance of 16 billion instructions per second.
  • The RenderFarm was comprised of 300 processors, representing the equivalent of approximately 300 Cray 1 supercomputers.
  • The RenderFarm used 300 megabytes of data for each frame, with rendering times ranging from two to 13 hours.
  • 800,000 computer hours were spent producing the final cut of "Toy Story" on the RenderFarm.
  • Pixar's RenderFarm can be upgraded to a nearly four-fold performance level without requiring additional space.

Sources:

  • "Making of Toy Story" press release from Sun Microsystems Computer Company (1995)
  • "Toy Story" article from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1995)
  • Pixar Animation Studios' website (1995)
  • Sun Microsystems Computer Company's website (1995)