WWDC/SIGGRAPH/BrickFest Movie

By: James Reynolds - Revised: 2007-03-28 james

Introduction

Read about and watch the POV-Ray movie shown at the 2004 WWDC, SIGGRAPH, and BrickFest DC conferences.


Watch now!

Click to play – MOV-File, 78.8 MB

About the animation

The animation is the work of several people. Anton Raves is the POV-Ray genuis who modeled and created the animation. Pieter Desnerck helped. The models are the work of several people (Chris Giddens, Daniel Jassim, Jamie Neufeld) and there are also many Lego models (including one that is trademarked/copyright Lucasfilm). James Reynolds extended some of Anton's scenes past 4 seconds and put each scene into one big POV-Ray file and he did all of the Xgrid work. It was rendered twice. Once at WWDC, and once at the University of Utah's Student Computing Labs.

WWDC 2004

At the World Wide Developer's Conference 2004, this animation was rendered in a slightly altered form (without music too) on about 20 to 30 WWDC G5 2.0 GHz computers. It took a week to render, and was a smashing success, but was kinda hiding in the Enterprise IT lab.

SIGGRAPH/BrickFest

The animation was rerendered at a higher resolution (1024 x 576) at the University of Utah Student Computing Labs. It was shown at the SIGGRAPH 2004 and BrickFest DC 2004 conferences.

It was rendered over a period of time at night, and one big render on July 24th, a local state holiday. That was the impressive render, reaching almost 400 GHz in processor power with about 130 computers, about 80 G5 2.0 Ghz dual processors.


Xgrid

While rendering the animation, we came up with a few scripts that helped us get the job done. At the end of the job, this was what we had:

xgrid_job_v5.pl – PL-File, 12.7 KB

This script was what we used to send the job. It isn't exactly a prime time script, it won't funtion as nicely as some would like, but it worked for what we needed to do.