How many cores render one frame of a pixar movie?

[bobesko]

For example Cars 2 needed a render farm of 12500 cores to render the entire movie. One frame took around 7 hours to render but it certainly isnt those 12500 cores just for one frame. That would be not feasible since it would take thousands years to make the whole movie. So how many render farm cores on average are used for making one frame of a Pixar movie?

 

[cdawall]

I would probably vary depending on server load. I doubt there are dedicated cores for each frame.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

All cores are likely used for each frame. They make many passes performing or extending a specific task in the frame. I'm sure the bulk of the processing power is dedicated to lighting. They probably use dynamic lighting on the final render so all the lighting has to be recomputed at every frame.

 

[cdawall]

They render multiple frames at the same time though...

 

[bobesko]

Do in fact all cores dont render one frame for several hours but lets say 50 frames?

 

[cdawall]

yes otherwise you would never get a movie done.

 

[bobesko]

Unfortunatelly Pixar doesnt specify how many cores are capable of rendering one frame in like 10 hours. Not that it matters that much but it would be an interesting information to know.

 

[kg4icg]

I would say that the rendering process is dynamic based on what the software wants to get done in a certain amount of time. So maybe the operators don't know how many cores are being used at the time a frame is being rendered.

I mean look at it this way. DO you you really want to sit at a desk looking at a task manager for a 12,500 core rendering farm trying to figure out which cores are rendering which frame. You be there all day chasing ghost.

 

[micropage7]

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/faq-threading.html
On a four-core processor you might allocate these four threads in several ways: rendering one frame using 4 threads, 2 frames simultaneously using 2 threads each, or 4 frames at the same time using 1 thread. (Memory permitting)
The simpler new unlimited threading model (RPS v15.0, RMS v3.0, RfM v4.0) will allow each license to use any number of threads. For example, if you have a dual quad machine, then RenderMan can automatically allocate a full rendering thread to each of the 8 processors to render your frame. This model scales simply to upcoming hardware and the entire compute capacity of machines with 16 cores or more can if desired be assigned to a singe rendering session. It should be noted that unlimited threading applies to each license invocation, reflecting the simplified model and current industry trends in application development and usage patterns.

 

[pantherx12]

They've probably moved onto GPU processing these days (hopefully)

3d rendering/lighting is a lot faster on a gpu.