By Steve Ranger, 23 May 2006 13:25
NEWS
Ed Leonard sounds like he's pretty happy with his job.
The CTO for DreamWorks Animation - the studio that created movies including Shrek, Shark Tale and its latest, Over the Hedge - said: "I think I have the coolest job on the planet."
Leonard told silicon.com: "For me it's really two things. I'm a technologist at heart so being able to work with leading edge technology is exciting and then being able to work with the most creative minds in the world is an amazing thing."
About half of Leonard's time is spent looking at new technologies that can make the movies better.
He said: "The thing about our business is that there is such an appetite for new technology and it's so easy to put it to use in the creative process that we are very fast at integrating it."
Over the Hedge is the studio's most ambitious computer-generated release so far, requiring more than 15 million hours of computer rendering - three times more than Shrek.
Instead of the classic 'lights, camera, action!', the filming sequence with computer-generated movies is switched around to 'camera, action, lights', with the lighting coming last.
The lighting and special effects for Over the Hedge were created using HP workstations and servers, running dual-core AMD Opteron processors.
Some of the trickiest challenges with the film were related to making the characters appear 'furry' - because making fur look lifelike takes up a lot of computing power, and as there aren't off-the-shelf tools for creating this effect DreamWorks had to build them.
Leonard said: "Technical innovation is paramount to everything we do," but, he added, this doesn't mean that the human touch is removed.
He explained: "All of our films are created by human hands, by the animators' hands and the director's hands. The computers are the tools by which they do it. The technology is the tools and the better the tools, the better the art.
"The more capable and faster the workstation the more creative the animator or artist can be. Our goal is not to have the technology in the way of the artist."
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1. Christian Lett
An inaccuracy in your report - there are plenty of off-the-shelf tools available for creating CGI hair and fur (Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut, and Maya Unlimited to name two). Often though, studios write their own hair systems or modify existing ones to cope with their specific requirements.