SE3D Animation Showcase

Watershed, HP, Alias

The Project

The SE3D animation showcase, managed by Watershed and sponsored by HP Labs and Alias, gave 11 groups of animators access to an experimental Maya utility rendering service (URS) developed by HP. Small studios cannot often afford to invest in and maintain dedicated servers for rendering, the process of adding light, shade, colour etc to computer-generated animation. The experimental URS allowed animators to create models on their own computers, send them over the internet to a data centre for rendering and receive them back as they are finished.

Working on the principles of Utility Computing – the distribution of computing power ‘on demand’ as a pay-per-use resource like water or electricity – this cutting edge research project gave participants a unique competitive advantage:

Here you can view one of the commissioned projects - Ebenezer Morgan’s Photography Emporium was commissioned by South West Screen and the South West Regional Development Agency as part of the SE3D animation showcase.

Comment

“How these 3D animations came about is a story that can be understood by everyone, regardless of which industry they come from. I once told the story to someone from the aerospace industry and showed him one of the films. The very next day he phoned me to ask whether we could do the same job with crash simulation”

John Manley, HP Labs

“The project embeds many of our current concerns, including networking as a business model, access to new and expansive technologies, new distribution avenues, mobilisation of production funding, changes in core business practice and the ownership of IP in the content that is created by the research process”.

Julie Taylor, Arts and Humanities Research Council