Disney's "Toy Story" uses more than 100 Sun Workstations to render images for first all-computer-based movie; Pixar Animation and Sun Microsystems create powerful rendering engine for Disney movie

Business Wire, Dec 4, 1995

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 4, 1995--The making of "Toy Story," the stunning new movie from Walt Disney Pictures that is the world's first full-length completely computer-generated animated film, involved the use of more than 100 high-powered computers from Sun Microsystems -- which together comprised one of the most powerful graphics rendering engines ever created.

When Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, of Point Richmond, Calif., the pioneering digital animation studio, joined creative forces on "Toy Story," Pixar selected the Sun systems for their affordability and expandability, as well as for their high quality graphics rendering abilities.

For the movie, Pixar created a networked bank or "cluster" of 117 Sun(TM) SPARCstation(TM) 20 workstations -- each containing at least two microprocessors, and running on Sun's Solaris(TM) operating environment -- to handle the critical task of "rendering" each of the 114,000 frames in the 77-minute movie.

Rendering is the time-and computationally-intensive process in which the correct lighting, textures and shading are applied to 3-D computer models to produce sharp, colorful images with photorealistic detail. To render the startlingly lifelike images in "Toy Story," Pixar used its own Academy Award-winning RenderMan(R) software running on its cluster of networked Sun systems, which was dubbed the "RenderFarm."

The use of multiprocessor, high-speed networked Sun technology answered one of Pixar's key requirements for "Toy Story": an unprecedented amount of sheer computing power. While more films are using digital effects, from "Jurassic Park" to "Forrest Gump," "Toy Story" is the first entirely computer-based animated film, which required a tremendous amount of rendering performance.

Until now, the cost of rendering technology to produce a full-length film has been prohibitive, but Sun's cost-effective, scalable multiprocessor technology promises to revamp the industry by providing these capabilities in a high-speed networked environment using standard systems.

"The production of `Toy Story' shows that Sun systems can offer the film industry an astonishing level of computing performance at much lower cost than ever before," said Anil Gadre, vice president of marketing at Sun Microsystems Computer Company. "Pixar's use of Sun marks a real change in the way computer animation will be done in the future. Now it will be more affordable for moviemakers to put their vision -- whether or not it exists in reality -- onto the screen."

"Toy Story," which opened nationwide Nov. 22, tells the story of a pair of toys, a cowboy doll named Woody (Tom Hanks supplies the voice) and a space ranger named Buzz Lightyear (voice by Tim Allen). When they get lost, the two must put aside their rivalry and join forces to make it back home.

Pixar's RenderFarm

Sun worked closely with a team from Pixar to create its RenderFarm, which serves as Pixar's central resource of computer processing power. The RenderFarm uses a network computing architecture in which a powerful SPARCserver(TM) 1000 acting as a "texture server" supplies the necessary data to the many rendering client workstations needed to complete the rendering process.

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. Some facts about Pixar's RenderFarm and the computing aspects of "Toy Story": -0-

-- The RenderFarm is one of the most powerful rendering engines ever assembled, comprising 87 dual-processor and 30 four-processor SPARCstation 20s and an 8-processor SPARCserver 1000. The RenderFarm has the aggregate performance of 16 billion instructions per second -- its total of 300 processors represents the equivalent of approximately 300 Cray 1 supercomputers.

-- Each system is the size of a pizza box, and all 117 systems work in a footprint measuring just 19 inches deep by 14 feet long by 8 feet high.

-- Sun is the price/performance leader, in Pixar's own rankings. The SPARCstation 20 HS14MP earned a rating of $80 per Rendermark (a Pixar measurement for rendering performance), while the comparable SGI Indigo Extreme came in at approximately $150 per Rendermark.

-- Using one single-processor computer to render "Toy Story" would have taken 43 years of nonstop performance.

-- Each of the movie's more than 1,500 shots and 114,000 frames were rendered on the RenderFarm, a task that took 800,000 computer hours to produce the final cut. Each frame used up 300 megabytes of data -- the capacity of a good-sized PC hard disk -- and required from two to 13 hours for final processing.

-- In addition to the high-resolution final rendering, the RenderFarm was also used to generate the test images animators needed to plan and evaluate lighting, texture mapping and animation. Since fast response is key in doing tests, RenderMan could produce test frames in as little as a few seconds.

-- Scalability is built-in: the RenderFarm can be upgraded (with more processors and disk storage) to a nearly four-fold performance level, without requiring any additional space. The RenderFarm also integrates seamlessly with Pixar's existing computer network containing different types of machines.