IMAGEWORKS USES NVIDIA PROCESSORS ON 'MEATBALLS'
The film’s spaghetti tornado scene includes elements rendered using
Splat, SPI's proprietary volumetric rendering tool, which is designed to run on the Quadro GPU. Atmospheric effects rendered in Splat include dust clouds, fire, sparks and tomato sauce.
"Our goal with leveraging Nvidia Quadro GPUs, and other new technologies we integrate, is to make our artists' lives better by helping them be more productive," notes Sony Pictures Imageworks’ CTO Rob Bredow. "Renders that would have taken 45 minutes or
more to run on a CPU, are now cut down to just 20 seconds on our Nvidia GPU-based pipeline.”
In addition to a GPU render pipeline, SPI has deployed Quadro solutions in all of its artists' workstations. The Nvidia processor enabled 24 frames-per-second, realtime previews of complex, data-intensive scenes in Autodesk Maya, presenting animators with more accurate representations of their work.