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Entertainment professionals and studios are continually raising the bar for 3D graphics and animation. To make possible these advances, SGI workstations are equipped with either Pentium or MIPS processors. The single or dual Pentium III or Pentium III Xeon processors, takes up to 2GB SDRAM and 90GB in hard disk space. Additionally, they offer VPro, SGI’s cross-platform graphics suite, which adds up to 64MB of high-speed double data rate (DDR) graphics memory, capable of handling the most demanding graphics assignments. A robust geometry performance supports more than 17 million triangles per second and 540 megapixels per second. Case Study: SGI and the Blockbuster Movie X-Men Along with a host of action special effects, the summer blockbuster film X-Men featured a dozen spectacular shape-shifting shots that challenged even the brightest minds at Kleiser-Walczak’s Hollywood production studio. After cyberscanning the body of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos who plays Mystique and the other actors who portray the characters that Mystique transforms into, Kleiser-Walczak used Maya™ software to create digital models of their bodies. These models were produced on SGI O2 and SGI Octane workstations and became the basis of the new 3D-morphing technique that Kleiser-Walczak developed for X-Men. With some individual shots requiring more than an hour per frame to render, the processing power and cross platform portability of the SGI workstations came into play. Chalice™, the Unix-based software used in the compositing phase, worked optimally on the SGI workstations. Said Frank Vitz, supervisor of visual effects, “The dual-processor Octane workstations were our workhorses,” with the horsepower necessary to stream together the rich digital morphing effects and their enormous supporting databases, ultimately enhancing the visual experience of X-Men. |
