Hammerhead’s work ranges from fully animated movies to VFX for live
action feature films. To optimise render times for clients, they use Redshift,
a GPU-accelerated, biased renderer.
Hammerhead Accelerates Creative Iteration with Redshift Biased Renderer |
Hammerhead Productionswas founded in 1994 and now runs studios in North and Central America, and across Asia. Their work encompasses fully animated features and TV pilots, and visual effects for live action feature films for the major studios including ‘42’, ‘Fury’, ‘Godzilla’ and ‘Prometheus’. The company was founded by former staff members ofPacific Data Images, now a part of Dreamworks. |
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Their most recent feature film work was for the 2015 movie‘Aloha’, a story set in Hawaii that required the creation of a satellite orbiting high above views of planet Earth below. [Pictured here.] As a middle-sized facility, for such projects Hammerhead plans ahead for speed and efficiency. |
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Biased Global IlluminationHammerhead’s rendering software isRedshift, a GPU-accelerated, biased renderer that uses approximation and interpolation to achieve results with relatively few samples, increasing its speed. Redshift supports several biasedglobal illuminationtechniques that enhance realism, including brute force, photon mapping with caustics, irradiance cache and irradiance point cloud. To render massive scenes with millions of polygons and complex textures that do not fit into the computer’s video memory, VRAM, Redshift uses anout-of-core architecture, allowing the use of regular off-the-shelf hardware. Most GPU renderers are limited to the VRAM available on the video card. |
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Faster IterationOn the ‘Aloha’ project, while the company could not afford a 400-CPU farm to push through as many frames as the project required, instead, Redshift was able to iterate fast enough so that the team could define the production workflow based on both their renderer and on their creative relationship with the project's director. CG supervisorKen Pellegrinosaid, "My supervisor would sit next to me when I was working on the final lighting of a scene, and we could make changes on the fly instead of having to wait until the 4pm review time, while other shots being worked on were rendering.” |
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More than RealRedshift's biased rendering approach suits a range of work like Hammerhead’s that demands varying degrees of realism. "When producing VFX, and especially fully-animated pieces, 100 per cent physical accuracy is not necessarily what the client wants," Ken said. "They have a look in mind, and recognise what looks right. Therefore we need to be able optimise render times to turn shots around quickly at high quality for client review. By iterating at a much higher rate when lighting a scene, for instance, I can get much faster feedback if a frame takes only five minutes, compared to 50 minutes on traditional renderers. |
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"The speed is obviously a huge improvement, but Redshirt’s GPU acceleration also means we can upgrade our render farm relatively cheaply compared to CPU farms. When a new, faster GPU becomes available, we can just swap it out with an older one, instead of having to build a full new computer."www.redshift3d.com |