DreamWorks Animation artists go over the top with HP technology

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"Our job at DreamWorks is to tell the very best story that we can. We couldn't tell the stories as visually exciting as we are able to do today — with the level of innovation and creativity — were it not for our partnership with HP." — Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO, DreamWorks Animation

Welcome to El Rancho Camelot Estates, the location of Over the Hedge, the latest computer-animated comedy from DreamWorks Animation SKG. But you won't find knights or castles here. In this Camelot it's vermin vs. verminator when an overly vigilant turtle named Verne and his furry friends rouse from a long winter's nap to get the wake up call of their lives: Their neighborhood has changed forever.

A rambunctious raccoon named RJ leads the quest as the creatures look for the good life and good food that lives Over the Hedge — a tall green wall that separates their woodland solitude from suburban sprawl. But there's a small problem: They've been targeted for termination by a suburban goddess named Gladys.

Scaling new heights of digital animation

To create Over the Hedge, DreamWorks artists scaled a pretty high hedge of their own — moving past the high standards of digital animation they set themselves with academy award-winning features like Shrek and then Shrek 2, which became the number one animated film of all time and the third-highest grossing film ever.

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For all DreamWorks animated features since 2001, that's meant giving animators, effects artists and lighters the enormous compute power needed to bring innovative and stunning visuals to life with state-of-the art HP technology.

On Over the Hedge, that innovation continued with high-performance HP xw9300 Workstations and the largest and most powerful server render farm ever used for a DreamWorks animated film — leveraging Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors.

HP workstations: Dual Core critter creation

Take a hedge with 25 million leaves, a raccoon with 1.6 million pieces of fur and a hairy cast of characters, and you've got a highly complex movie that could choke lesser workstations.

RJ's 1.6 million pieces of fur could have choked lesser workstations. » View enlarged image

But with high-performance HP xw9300 workstations featuring Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors animators, effects artists and lighters ploughed through that complexity with ease.

"Technology is the tool of our craft and using state-of-the-art workstations like the HP xw9300 ensures that our artists have the very best tools in the industry," says DreamWorks Animation CTO, Ed Leonard. "Great tools in the hands of great artists produce great movies, as is evidenced in Over the Hedge."

On the workstations, artists worked interactively with graphics in near real-time to more closely see what the actual film would look like. They could spin complex models around, make decisions about their shape and form and quickly make changes to improve the visual effect — without interrupting the creative or work flow.

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The workstations' Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors also delivered the throughput artists needed to work on multiple shots at the same time. With the extra speed and multi-tasking capabilities, there was additional time for more of the iterations and improvements that brought Over the Hedge to new levels of artistry.

"HP workstations are helping to bring incredible power and capability into the hands of our film makers," says Head of Digital Operations, Derek Chan. "Today, there's a way for us to execute almost any good idea."

HP server farm: Fur, foliage and flexibility

The rendering process converts artists' workstation-generated models into finished images, complete with lighting, textures and special effects. The high volume of fur and foliage in Over the Hedge demanded the largest and most powerful render server farm ever used for a DreamWorks Animation film.

A ProLiant server farm rendered Over the Hedge's furry cast of characters. » View enlarged image

"We've certainly had fur on characters before, but we haven't had this many with long fur, which creates an extraordinary level of complexity," explains Visual Effects Supervisor, Craig Ring. "Each strand of fur is a little piece of geometry, and the longer it is, the more it interacts with all the surrounding hairs and the more complicated it is to render."

In fact, more than 15 million rendering hours went into the film — delivered by a Linux cluster of several thousand servers, including HP ProLiant servers featuring AMD Dual-Core Opteron processors. The cluster is split across DreamWorks sites in Redwood City and Glendale.

Rendering those images and getting them back to artists and directors for review and refinement quickly was key to keeping production on track. On any given night, the render farm crunched through more than 20,000 individual jobs — handling multiple requests simultaneously, thanks to dual-core processors.

The speed of the ProLiant server farm meant artists and directors could make the improvements they wanted, knowing that they would be implemented quickly. "We were able to give our film makers the flexibility to spend more time on the creative aspects of our film because we were confident we could get it all rendered," says Ring.

With a crew of more than 200 on the film, change was a constant. "I'm always amazed by how many changes there are at the last minute," Ring continues. "They add lines, add jokes, or polish things and say, 'We'd like to make these changes, can you get them done?' In almost every case during Over the Hedge, we were able to say 'yes' thanks to HP workstations and the HP ProLiant server farm. And it all paid off with a really fun, heartwarming story."