Animation + cloud, cast the dream of Chinese animation

Summer is coming, the children also have a holiday, the big screen appeared on the most is also animated, aiming at this schedule of the various road has been more and more. Recently, by Aliyun to do the support of the 3D animated film "Kunta: Box Story" trailer exposure, the film three characters spinach, milk bubbles, gaga characters vivid colors, Meng flavor, not only that, the film's visual effects and sound effects are more people jaw-dropping, Is it impossible to imagine that Chinese animation can make such a good effect? The main feeling is that we did not see any Chinese animations that were better than this before.

And how is the audition effect of this animation achieved?

The story goes back three years. Director Li Yu said, he is a madman, once upon a time, he is a dream of the teenager, and "Kunta: Box Story" is his dream. At first, when the animation was made, all the people think he is in the Arabian Nights, so in the first seven months of time, he came from all sides of the pressure to do a small part of the creation, 7 months later, when he led the team to watch his work, everyone has the belief to adhere to.

But the mere conviction is not enough, in the production of the villain in the animation, due to the character's setting and the technical limitations of the time, director Li Yu and his team faced a difficult decision to continue or give up.

At this juncture, he met a man, Aliyun President Jian (recommended reading: An interview with Jian--from the butterfly effect to the marginal effect of interpreting Aliyun strategy), in the words of Director Li Yu, when a madman met another madman, he accomplished this impossible task.

Break down the rendering bottleneck

Say they are "crazy" and have to start with a set of data. The world-wide "Avatar" movie visual effects were produced by the famous Vita Digital company, which employed 900 people to work for the film. To render Avatar, the Vita Digital employs 10,000 square feet of server clusters, 4,000 servers and 35,000 processor cores.

It is not difficult to estimate, to make a Hollywood-like 3D animation film, optical hardware server and the cost of the computer room will be tens of millions of yuan, and its rendering time cost is also in years. In the age of 2D animated screens, few people are willing to take the time to do something seemingly impossible.

As the saying goes, dreams do not abandon the painstaking pursuit of the people. Li Yu holds the ideal for Chinese children to see beautiful, positive energy, high production-level animated movies, and with the idea of letting cloud computing help small and medium-sized Enterprises realize their dream of innovation, so that smaller companies can do big things, large companies can achieve impossible possibilities (nothing is impossible) This ideal jian meet. They hit and boldly began to conceive of "cloud rendering" to realize the dream.

Rendering (Render) in computer graphics is a process of transforming three-dimensional model into an image, which is the decisive step in the final realization of picture rendering. Or the movie "Avatar" for example, single-machine rendering average one frame (layer) rendering time of 2 hours, 2k-4k resolution, 160 minutes of video, 9000 pictures per minute (60 seconds x30 Frame x5 layer), the overall rendering time needs 2.88 million hours, a considerable server to work 328 years. 3D animated Movies, each frame has two images, rendering takes more than 666 years to complete.

However, after using cloud computing technology, one or more rendering tasks can be divided into several parts, which are rendered by each node in the cluster, so as to achieve fast rendering, shorten the process of animation production and improve the effect of production, in order to break the rendering bottleneck in front of domestic 3D animated films.

Domestic animated cartoon by cloud computing gorgeous turn

The dream only relies on the formidable platform and the technical strength to be able to take into reality.

This elaborately crafted homemade 3D animated blockbuster, using Aliyun 6700 high-performance computer built large machine corps, day and night Non-stop video rendering, the cumulative calculation of more than 10 million nuclear hours, in the film's last 3 minutes of the exciting battle scene, each frame of the scene to the rendering of the duration of 7 hours, In order to achieve the perfect effect, it can be said that the entire production of the film One-fourth of the time is in Ali "grow", and finally completed the entire film in early May rendering work.

If, according to past practice, the animation maker buys the server by itself, it will take at least 3 years to complete the rendering farm, and Aliyun will complete the rendering work in 3 months.

From the cost, compared with the construction of the farm, in the same time cost, under the premise of a one-time investment billion. And the use of rendering cloud, the whole piece of cost savings of more than 90%. Aliyun President Jian said: "With the cloud, let more movies like" Kunta "become possible. And the meaning of cloud computing is not only the production of a beautiful 3D animation film, is a positive impetus to the entire industry. ”

From the picture quality, "Kunta: Box Story" to the shock of the 3D visual effects for domestic animated cartoon rectification. Industry insiders said, "Kunta: Box Story" is a domestic animation from mass production to qualitative change milestone. It can be foreseen that the picture quality of domestic animated movies, the overall ability of special effects creativity will be realized through the development of cloud computing technology, and its infinite close to Hollywood dream will become available.

If the 2012-year "anime Cloud" still only stay in the exploration of the Chinese experimental stage, then the 2013 "Kunta: Box Story" This 3D animated film release, then opened the "Anime Cloud" of the mysterious veil, to show the world of domestic animation in the cloud computing technology Strong Support, The standard of production is the astonishing creativity of Hollywood.