Sinbad conquers 2D and 3D animation: DreamWorks embarks on a voyage to an all-HP, all-Linux workflow - Animation

Post, August, 2003 by Ken McGorry

GLENDALE, CA -- Jeffrey Katzenberg warmly addressed a biannual assemblage of HP staff in San Jose not long before the release of Sinbad, Legend of the Seven Seas this summer. Katzenberg, famed for his work on animated hits for Disney and subsequently a co-founder of DreamWorks, had good reason to come and speak to this particular troop of techies. In an important way, DreamWorks and HP's technological alliance could take both companies to new levels of consumer acceptance and a big reason for that is Katzenberg's bold plan to release two, sometimes three animated films per year.

To do this successfully you need lots of great animators and lots of great computer systems. The agreement between DreamWorks and HP, now almost two years old, designates HP as DreamWorks' "preferred technology provider for core technology purchases."

JeffWood, HP's director of product marketing for personal workstations, attended that meeting and has played an active role in forging his company's technological partnership with the film studio, so he could feel the excitement when Katzenberg got up and urged the group onward to new heights. He saw DreamWorks Animation's transition to Linux from Unix, which began during the late stages of production on Shrek. Now HP and DreamWorks are looking at an all-Linux pipeline with four CG animated movies in production currently here at the Glendale site and upstate at PDI/DreamWorks, including next year's Sharkslayer and Shrek 2. Make that five movies if you count the English DreamWorks/Aardman production of a full length Wallace and Gromit clay animated film.

DreamWorks' animated action/fantasy flick Sinbad is the first"all Linux" result of this technology alliance and all that Linux is on HP workstations and servers. "These studios pride themselves on their own software IP [intellectual property]," says Wood, "and their ability to render lifelike hair or skin tones or mouth and appendage movements."

EXPRESSIVE TECHNOLOGY

DreamWorks Animation's head of technology, Ed Leonard, himself emphasizes that the animators' "first and foremost job is to tell a great story." Sinbad itself is a deft hybrid of traditional cel-style animation and 3D techniques. To best tell the Sinbad story, Leonard says, "we selected 2D characters because there were a lot of expressive human characters. It seemed we needed the richness and fidelity of hand-drawn characters to express all this rich emotion." Brad Pitt voiced the Sinbad character, Catherine Zeta-Jones played the female lead and Michelle Pfeiffer portrayed the scheming, evil Goddess of Chaos.

"Seventy-five percent of the movie is set on or near water, and water is notoriously difficult to do in CG," Leonard continues. However, in the final analysis, he says, "this film used an extraordinary amount of CG 3D techniques; it was a digital film with 2D characters in it as opposed to a traditional film with a couple of CG shots. Everything from scene planning and layout [was accomplished] using digital techniques to previsualize what the directors [Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore] were going to see in terms of cinematography, all the way through to some pretty sophisticated effects and rendering." Sinbad saw about two years of front-end planning and another two years of "back-end" production.

As for all that water, the deadly sirens on the rocks have a watery makeup not unlike the "pseudopod" sequence in The Abyss, but they actively go after their quarry, Sinbad's crew. "Water that 'acts' is the holy grail," Leonard says. The ocean itself is also CG, and custom DreamWorks software helped give the waves their motion and control their "peakiness." But "there was a whole bunch of hand-drawn elements that got blended in" too, he adds.

There are great beasts to battle in Sinbad, including the goddess's slimy sea monster, an obvious candidate for CG, and the Roc, a giant bird of prey atop a snowy mountain. The Roc is a CG creation, flat-shade rendered with more of a traditional animation look. And Sinbad's crew is also CG--not in close-up but in long shots when their "CG stand-ins" are working on the ship--they're disguised with flat-textured "toon shaders."

Between the all-Linux pipeline (though Leonard admits there may be a Mac or NT box somewhere on the premises) and the scads of Maya 4.5 seats, Leonard is most happy about "the kind of power we're putting into our artists' hands today--dramatically improved even from a couple of years ago! Linux enabled us to get aligned better with quantity processors--both in graphics and in CPUs --and this stuff is moving really rapidly and we're now able to embrace those changes quickly when they happen."

For 2004's Shrek2, the DreamWorks Animation team deployed HP x4000 workstations and for Sharkslayer the later x8000s are in use. And now DreamWorks' Leonard and others are looking at HP's Itanium 2-based systems to provide 64-bit backend rendering (rather than 32-bit) for greater rendering speed--perhaps for Sharkslayer Software enabling collaboration between animators will be coming from the HP development team soon as well.