Masters of Animation

Profiles in Success: University of Technology, Sydney

Sydney, Australia: In 2004, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) inaugurated yet one more in a string of Australia-first programs - a Masters of Animation degree. A cross-disciplinary study of animation offered by the faculties of Information Technology; Humanities and Social Sciences; and Design, Architecture and Building (DAB), the new postgraduate degree is so innovative, that it is already drawing students from as far afield as China.

When the course was introduced, the primary computing resources available to students and staff consisted of 21 Apple dual-processor G4 Macs along with an Apple Xserve.

Interestingly, the Macs had been implemented in 2000 to replace SGI workstations that had reached their end of life. According to DAB Faculty Computing Manager Thomas Esamie, the decision to replace the SGI workstations with Macs had been influenced strongly by the increasing number of students undertaking computer graphics-related studies.

"If we had stayed with SGI, we probably would have been able to buy only 10 machines; and given the classes often have more than 20, it would have meant doubling up on each workstation. By opting to go down the Mac path, we were able to purchase high performance graphics workstations and enough to ensure one for each student in a class."

— Thomas Esamie, DAB Faculty Computing Manager

But with 3D animation rendering being one of computing's most resource hungry and demanding processes, the 21 Macs were being pushed to their limits with the demands of rendering animation projects submitted by over 60 students. So in 2006, new facilities consisting of 19 rack-mounted Apple Xserves, an Apple Xserve RAID and 46 dual-processor dual-core G5 Mac workstations was brought on-line.

Pascal Grosvenor, DAB Senior Computing Officer, states that since the Mac upgrade, rendering performance has improved almost six-fold, a performance increase that is of particular importance during the last weeks of each semester. "This is when students are working flat-out to get their final projects completed," Grosvenor explains. "And it's when the Xserves and Macs are being virtually punished 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The great thing is that they take that punishment in their stride."

For their final project, students are required to produce a five-minute animation short that showcases their all-round skills in plot development, scriptwriting, storyboarding and, of course, 3D animation. According to Grosvenor, it's those projects that subject the Apple environment to the real pressure test. "There's an enormous amount of rendering taking place," he says. "With 25 frames per second and up to five minutes required for the final project, that's 7,500 individual frames that need to be rendered.

"In many cases, it's actually closer to 10,000 frames because, just as in films, the students often create multiple points of view and camera angles for individual scenes," Grosvenor continues.

To manage the computing-intensive frame rendering, Grosvenor implemented the Rush render queue management software. With Rush, Grosvenor has been able to create a load-balanced render farm consisting of Xserves and Macs, each playing a part in the around-the-clock animation rendering projects submitted by students.

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