Intricate Tech Brings 'Madagascar' to Life
May 26, 2005
By Peter Galli
The ability of animators to turn an imaginary world into reality for
millions of movie-goers rests solidly on the shoulders of
technological advances, said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder and
CEO of the DreamWorks SKG studio.
At a recent media conference about "Madagascar," the latest animated
movie from DreamWorks, which opens at theaters around the country on
Friday, Katzenberg answered an eWEEK question about technological
advances by saying, "If you can imagine it, then we can pretty much
make it happen."
He pointed to how technology has revolutionized animated filmmaking
since "Aladdin" was produced in the early 1990s, and how it now
affects every aspect of the animation process.
As an example, he cited the fact that the color palette has expanded
from four colors to 250 over the past 13 years, while the "Madagascar"
landscape has 150,000 objects moving at once.
On the technical front, all of the technical work, production design,
animation and rendering for "Madagascar" was done on a complex system
of Hewlett-Packard hardware running Linux as well as its own
proprietary operating system known as e-motion.
The movie has taken about four years to complete, which sounds like a
long time, but when all of the stages and components are considered,
it's not really long at all. Consider that every detail of every
person, creature, element, plant and background has to be
painstakingly coded and then stored in the huge database of the
e-motion operating system.
Also, every movement made by the foliage, background, elements such
water, and the characters, in this case all animals, had to appear
realistic to the design of the movie, which has gone back and adopted
the "stretch and squash" technique along with the not-quite-real
approach of cartoons and animations of the past.
Every hair on every animal represents a line of computer code, with
lead character Alex the Lion having 1.7 million hairs on his head. The
design team also developed five different kinds of lemurs with 12
variations of hair type, or 60 possible combinations, for characters.
This would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Philippe Gluckman, who supervised a team of 45 and all of the film's
visual effects, told eWEEK in an onsite interview at his office in
Redwood Shores, Calif., that HP supplied all of the servers, desktops,
laptops and notebooks, which were powered by AMD Opteron processors.
The render farm for production consisted of HP Proliant servers
running AMD Opteron processors.
DreamWorks moved to the AMD Opteron processors during movie
production, which was risky given the possibility of disruption, but
this turned out not to be the case. "The transition to the AMD Opteron
processors was made midway through production and was amazingly
smooth," Gluckman said.
E-motion, DreamWorks' proprietary software, used a specific
programming language close to C and allowed those users who were
technical to go in and program certain components, which gave them a
good measure of control over their work and also saved time.
"Production artists don't program in any of the core technologies like
the render program; they program in script on the production side," he
said.
Asked what some of the main rendering challenges were, he said getting
the diverse foliage and the fur of the lemurs to render was very
problematic at first, using up way too much memory. The fur had to be
created from scratch because there was no existing component in the
software database, so some memory problems emerged early on in which
only five or six lemurs could be rendered before all of the memory was
used up.
"On the software side, the lemurs' fur put our memory to test as it
exposed things in the render that hadn't been exposed before and
needed optimization. Initially we could only render six Lemurs, and
some scenes, like the rave, where they are all dancing, required
hundreds of Lemurs," he said.
The solution? Create something that represented the volume of fur and
the edge breakup that real fur would give, and that had shades like
the fur itself, but which was not the actual fur. This solved the
problem, which was helped by the fact that the AMD processors on the
Proliant servers gave an immediate 35 percent increase in performance
and speed.
DreamWorks also sent hundreds of thousands of rendering hours to HP's
Utility Rendering Service, essentially extending DreamWorks' own
render farm and helping provide the computing power needed to complete
the film.
"When we ran into rendering issues, we just looked at the ways we
could solve them, using our hardware, software and on the production
side. Once it became clear there was such a problem, we bring the
production and technology sides together to brainstorm around this. It
took us just a few months at most to develop a fix for this," Gluckman
said.
Rex Grignon, the head of character animation for DreamWorks Animation,
told eWEEK in an interview that the technological advances made over
the past five years have allowed a movie such as "Madagascar" to be
made, saying the computer had become the tool through which all
creative ideas were now expressed.
"Our desktop machines have benefited from the surge in available
memory, and that allows us to now deal with those elements that were
previously very complex far more easily at the desktop level. We need
to have access to a huge amount of data, and our software had to
facilitate that," he said.
The company's e-motion operating system, which has all been written
internally and is proprietary software, is continually updated and
expanded, both to plan for long-term needs as well as to meet the
shorter-term technical needs of every movie.
While Grignon said the issue of the company having its own, internally
developed custom software has often been debated, for him the
positives by far outweigh the negatives.
"One of the best things about this is that I can talk to the people
who wrote the actual software, explain to them my specific needs or
problems, and know that they will start working on that immediately,"
he said, which is clearly not the case with software bought from a
vendor.
In addition, DreamWorks and its staff maintain complete control over
that software, its legacy, and its development and architecture going
forward, he said. But on the downside is the huge cost of maintaining
the software, which has been developed over more than 20 years.
Another of the challenges with "Madagascar" was that it used a
stylized movement technique, where the characters do not look like
real animals and thus do not have to move like them.
But, that being said, the animators wanted any movement to be
realistic for that animal form. In fact, the animators have access to
a mirrored room where they can act out the moves to see how they look
and where the different body parts are placed when those movements are
made, before they actually create the poses for the characters.
Also, the "squash and stretch" animation technique had to be
programmed in its own sophisticated, script-based programming
language, which could take days to weeks depending on the detail and
complexity of the image being created.
While this technique had not been used before in a modern animated
movie, Gluckman said he wants to recreate the technique, as it gives
the artists and animators as much freedom as possible, including the
extreme definitions and the ability to squash and stretch out the
characters.
"You cannot imagine the sheer complexity of these images. We had to
find strategies to manage the jungle [a major element of the film],
not only for the rendering of final frames, but also to give our staff
access to all this data," he said.
When asked what they planned to do next, many of those who worked on
Madagascar said, "Take a long vacation." But given that as one movie
is completed another is already in development, there will not be much
downtime.
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