Most people have seen LOTR: The two towers the last few months. Something many people also have seen is the big and very well-done computer animations which are used often in the movie. The CG-effects (Computer Generated) from the two parts of the LOTR-trilogy have doubtless required a huge amount of computer capacity. There is plenty interesting information in an article at theonering.net about the systems Weta Digital have used to render the huge amounts of CG-material in the movies.
The rendering system used under the production consists of 192 dual 1 GHz Pentium III system and 448 dual 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 system. This is 2355 GHz pure processor capacity, pretty impressing.
There is also thorough information about how the work with the animated character Gollum functioned. One of the movie-world’s most impressing CG-characters needed around 20GB textures(!) to get as realistic as possible. The probably most scaring fact is that both the software and hardware was almost not enough for the third movie. One of those bottlenecks was Intel’s 32-bit processor architecture.
Read the whole article here.
