Animation Sophistication: The Croods Required 80 Million Compute Hours

Lucas123 writes "It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%."

But...

[Ixtl]

... it's still terrible. They could have made it with construction paper cut-outs and hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months. Also, as is traditional on Slashdot, I am basing my vociferous opinion exclusively on the obnoxious 30-second trailers I've seen, and have not actually seen the movie.

Re:Shouldn't it double?

[Nemyst]

Things like 3D assets, textures, etc. don't suddenly need to be duplicated. In fact, the 3D scene itself needs very little changes, just having two cameras instead of one. It's once the movie's rendered that things double in size, but that's only a subset of the total movie's required space.

The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene

[Taco Cowboy]

They could have ... hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months

I can't agree with you more !!!

The development of the CGI technology has opened up a lot of possibilities and leveling the playing fields for many MANY people

But on the other hand, the relative ease of applying CGI animation and effects into movies also gave rise to a whole lot of JUNKS

Hollywood is indeed in decline - back in the days when Ben-Hur was made, it wasn't only the epic sets (it was the largest ever made) that made waves, but the story line, the scripting, the twist and turn, and the suspense, that grabbed the attention of the audience

Nowadays we have movies that are essentially "flat" --- the storyline is flat, the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"

They have taken the FUN out of movie making, and also, movie watching

Re:Define "compute-hour"

[jxander]

I can really only see it going 1 of 2 ways. Either the biggest number that's technically possible, carefully tracking all all cores, threads, and processors as separate, also counting double if the person has 2 windows open with Crood-related tasks in both ... or the wildest-ass-guess the could muster. "We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.