Puss 'n' Boots

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Last evening, I was shanghaied by friends and dragged to the local theater to see Dreamworks' latest creation, Puss 'n' Boots. I know it seems kind of silly to tout a "kids' movie" here in a tech forum, but it you're a fan of CGI, this is a must see! Not only was the movie outrageously funny and highly entertaining -- even for adults -- heck, especially for adults -- but its state-of-the-art computer graphics are jaw-droppingly amazing! I consider myself pretty up on geeky stuff like this, but I was floored by the visual realism and production qualities it manifested. If you go, be sure to stay for all of the credits at the end. It must have run into the thousands of names from tech centers stretching from LA to India. I simply cannot comprehend the magnitude of the creativity, effort, and seemingly impossible organization that goes into a feature such as this. 'Highly recommended! (And if you want to avoid screaming kids, stay away from the afternoon matinees. )

-Phil

mindrobots

I second the recommendation! +1 for technical merit and pure enjoyment!

Ale

I do not know (did not look up) the voice acting, I'd love for it to be Banderas, specially in Castillan! well yes it is him. But I'd pass the English for the Castillan (aka Spanish, for the non speakers) version, sorry but it just rocks!!!! I'll see if I can get it, dubbed to German is surely a Cat-astrophe !

JimInCA

Phil,
Shouldn't Browser have done this movie review? I'd rather hear what he thinks of the movie... ;-)
Jim...

Browser

kitty softpaws, mrrrooower!



-browz

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

That's what I figured. Unless she was onscreen, he had his head buried in the popcorn.

-Phil

hover1

Phil,

Did you see the 3D version?

May have to take me Mum to see it this weekend.

Jim

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

No, the local theater doesn't have a 3D projection system. It's still quite awesome in 2D, though. It's interesting how many animated features are being done in 3D now. I assume it's nearly as easy to do that as 2D, since the modeling is done in 3D anyway. So creating a stereo version is "just" a second rendering step for each frame from an offset viewpoint.

Speaking of rendering, I was astonished how many credits were listed just for "lighting." The selection and placement of the virtual illumination sources must be a huge job. It's hard to imagine the computational horsepower required for the raytracing once the modeling and surface texturing are complete.

-Phil

hover1

People always complain when I sit through the credits. "Let's go, It's over" I don't go till the lights come up.

I'll report on the 3D version. Prior, I saw Avatar in 3D, and I was awed.

Jim

Microcontrolled

@Phil: Movies like this can take up to 60 hours per frame to render on a single powerful computer. Everything in modern animated movies is extremely high poly and usually includes various modifiers that farther complicate the render process, including hair, particles, smoke, fire, physics, etc.
Also, the difference between a well placed lighting system and a standard lighting system is very dramatic in the realism it brings into a scene. Lighting is fairly easy if the rendering engine utilizes indirect (or ambient) lighting, but this usually quintuples the already-long render times.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

They must have thousands of processors working on it. At 60 hours per frame, I come up with 324,000 processor-days to render a 90-minute, 24fps movie. I suspect that the rendering time from frame to frame within a scene can be abbreviated somewhat, though, since the changes between frames would be small.

-Phil

GordonMcComb

Supposedly Puss n Boots required 60 million render hours, about 10% of which were from cloud-based systems. That's the future for these kinds of animation projects, as leasing time ends up being less expensive overall than expanding the hardware (which has to be replaced every year or two anyway). A growing number of outfits are offering time on CUDA and FireStream enabled boxes, basically racks and racks in data centers based who knows where.

Lots of animated features employ part-time techs who may only be involved for only a few weeks, or even a few days. So the list of credits can be huge. Even the voice actors are usually in for just day or so, depending on the size and complexity of their part. That's really good work if you can get it. The really best of the best voice actors are constantly working. This guy, for example, is extraordinarily good. I've worked with him a couple of times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Arnold_Taylor

-- Gordon

GordonMcComb

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) wrote: »

They must have thousands of processors working on it. At 60 hours per frame, I come up with 324,000 processor-days

Not a bad guess, but industry wags peg it more like 2.5 million processor days. The difference is probably due to the fact that these movies are rendered more than once. They're always draft rendered as "dailies," and this time is counted, too. They may go through many iterations before they're ready for a final render.

And I'm pretty sure they do separate renders for 2D and 3D, so more time there, too.

-- Gordon

Microcontrolled

They typically have large "render farms" that do this massive processing. They do not have a separate render for 3D, they simply add another camera to the scene, position it in such a way that it makes the other eye's perspective, and make it the "child" object of the primary camera. Then they render out the images from the other camera and interlace the frames in post-processing. So 3D takes twice as long to render as 2D, because they are essentially rendering out the movie twice. This is why they advertise it so heavily.

GordonMcComb

You might be right, but I'm not sure they simply take "Camera A" for the 2D render and Cameras A/B for the 3D, as that will mean the convergence will be different for the two versions of the film. Most of these animated 3D movies use exaggerated depth, which means a greater separation between the virtual cameras, which means that the left (or right) only camera will see a somewhat different scene than what a viewer of the full stereoscopic version will see. Ideally the 2D version should have a camera in the center.

I'm pretty sure they advertise the 3D version so heavily because they get twice the money for the tickets, at only a fractional increase in production cost. Rendering is not a chief expense since it's just scaled-up machine time. If the added rendering costs (say) 10% more, then upwards of 100% higher gross for the first few weeks seems like a pretty good business decision.

-- Gordon