Imageworks developed a fire library system to accommodate fire sources in a variety of situations and environments. In this way, Chen could call up a different variation without having vfx artists involved. 

They also developed a fire library system to accommodate so many static fire sources (torches, sconces, candles and fireplaces) in a variety of situations and environments. “We wanted Jerome to call up a different variation [via a Katana plug-in] without having vfx artists involved,” Bialek explains. “The lighter would handle Jerome’s requests, and render using a proprietary sphere volume renderer.”

Chen adds that it was vital to rewrite the backend of the pipeline as well. “Rendering large crowd scenes needed to be started months in advance of the actual shot work in order for the layers to be prepared for the lighting and compositing artists to have something to work on. So we came up with a specific rating system in the render queue to prioritize shots for the artists. Even though we had several thousand processors, some of these jobs could take 200,000 processor hours to render because of all the layers that had to be made. So while you were waiting a month to render the Mead Hall sequence with nearly 100 characters, you would be working on short shots with a couple of characters. Upgrading the whole company to multi-core processors became its own engineering challenge. They may be blazing fast but suck up a lot more power and need a lot of cooling requirements. We exceeded space on the lot so we had to have little rendering nodes all throughout Culver City.”

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.