We all know about the SETI@home project, in which the processing power of thousands of computers is harnessed to do calculations for SETI. Now, science-fiction shows have large CGI requirements, and the rendering is computationally intensive. Why don’t they have a similar set-up, in which fans “donate” computing time to their favorite shows? Considering the largely technophile and enthusiastic fan-base, it would seem quite worthwhile.
IANACS (I’m not a computing scientist although I’m taking a part time course in the subject, longest disclaimer yet for me!) but perhaps the computational power provided by a few high end machines is sufficient for their needs. When was the last time you watched some poorly plotted crap on the newer Outer Limits and thought “it was only the CGI that let it down.”
Is the power needed to sift through SETI, cancer research, global warming etc info really on a par with some CGI for a modern day SF show?
Well, it does take “render farms” to create high end CGI as was seen in “Final Fantasy the movie” a few years back. I’d donate my computer’s spare cycles for high end adult anime, that’s for damn sure. I guess it’s just part of having a noble spirit. What a great experiment it would be!
Babylon5@Home.
Hm. Has potential.
I think the main problem is that SF shows have deadlines where the graphics have to be finished by a certain date. Distributed processing (by volunteers!) sounds just a bit too iffy to rely upon. SETI isn’t under such time constraints.
I doubt very much that computational limits are the problem here.
First of all I’d wager most if not all Sci-Fi series outsource their CGI to companies specialised in doing this (for example Star Trek and Industrial Light and Magic). I doubt these companies lack the hardware to render even very complex CGI.
The probelm is likely budget and time related. If you can only afford to spend so much in CGI, then you’re not going to get quality effects. You’re going to go with a smaller company with fewer, less capable artists, who just aren’t going to do a great job in the limited time available.
Rendering a 3d Scene is time consuming, but it’s a minor thing compared ot the time and talent required to create complex 3D scenes and animate them.
A lot of SF shows do it in-house. It’s not as expensive as it once was. It’s easier nowadays because most of the effects that were really difficult when Titanic or Jurassic Park were doing it, are now simple stuff that can be done off-the-shelf.
Render Farms are cheap, really. A few hundred servers linked up is not that difficult to create and maintain, once you’ve got it going. So all that is lcking is the talent behind it, and that obviously is never a guarantee. But in my opinion based on observation of the shows, Galactica has a lot of very talented CG artists, and Lost has almost none.
I suspect another problem would be that each individual computer also have to download high resolution image and bump map files to create the textures for all the objects in each scene. Not that it couldn’t be done, but it would add to the bandwidth requirements, and add a level of complexity to the distribution of data.
Yes, SETI at home etc. have a little bit of data and lots of computation, not lots of data and lots of computation. If one of the computers never respond, it is no big problem where it is for CGI on a deadline. Also, I suspect the images are top secret, and they wouldn’t want them wandering onto the computers of their competitors.
I think the primary issue is that the bottleneck on good CGI is not rendering time or computing power. It’s humans… artists and animators.