Animation on the Grid

I read an interesting article the other day about an open movie project by the blender foundation (creators of a free open source 3D content creation suite). They used Sun's Grid computing (similar to Amazons Cloud) to render the entire movie.

The movie is called Big Buck Bunny. The full article by the team describes how they farmed out the heavy lifting of their movie to network.com apparently using up to 240 of the 600 available CPU's on Suns grid. The article also describes all the difficulties they encountered with such a unique approach to movie rendering.

While hardware prices themselves aren't all that expensive in "normal" quantities, the computing power needed to render an animated film in the today's "required" resolution and life like movements requires tremendous amounts of computing power. The upfront capital required to acquire such power is mitigated by services like Suns network.com and Amazons Cloud. These services charge on a per hour basis and require no upfront capital to get started.

For companies and/or organizations that need huge amounts of horsepower without the capital to purchase the hardware these services offer a really good alternative.

You can download the movie or watch it on you-tube or conversely just watch it right here on the embedded player.

For the best resolution, however, I would suggest downloading.

Happy Coding...