Demonstrated that the Grid can allow computer-generated animation
companies to take
advantage of the ground-breaking, 3D image-capture technology;
Demonstrated that the Grid can enable
computer-generated animation companies to use on demand processing
power available from the UK's academic HPC facilities, under circumstances
to do with the rendering technologies used;
Undertook a study of best
practice in the construction and management of VOs in a commercial Grid
context.
In the commercial world an increasing number of projects are being
undertaken by consortia of companies that come together for the lifetime
of a contract and then break up on successful completion of the work.
This form of working is commonplace in, for instance, the construction
and aerospace industries, but also in the media industries (film,
television etc). Such examples of collaborative working are called
Virtual Organisations (VOs) in the computer science and Grid
communities.
In addition to providing seamless access to a pool of computing and
data resources, the Grid has been widely identified as providing a core
platform for the establishment of VOs for industry and commerce. The
Pepper's Ghost Production Grid (PGPGrid) project explores the use of
the Grid for the production of Computer-Generated Animations. It brings
together three complementary but
very different organisations:
3D-Matic Lab at The
University of Glasgow, part of the Imaging Faraday Partnership and
expert in 3D processing technology;
EPCC at The University of
Edinburgh, Europe's leading High Performance Computing centre.
Each of these partners takes a specific role in the Virtual Organisation:
Pepper's Ghost Ltd provides the core animation requirement
for the project, making use of the 3D-Matic Lab and EPCC
resources to produce a short, computer-generated animation film.
3D-Matic Lab provides access to the 3D capture facility at
The University of Glasgow to enable Pepper's Ghost to produce the
detailed animated models for subsequent rendering.
EPCC provides the middleware and access to processing power for both the production
of the animated models and the final rendered output.
The work undertaken can be broken down into four main areas:
Establishment of a Grid-enabled Virtual Organisation and study of
its requirements (Work Package 1, or WP1);
Animated sequence capture by Pepper's Ghost at the 3D-Matic Lab (WP2 and WP3);
Processing of the animated sequences
into moving cartoon character models using Grid resources and
suitable middleware (WP4 and WP5);
Rendering of the final scenes at EPCC using the model data and the
full scene information provided by Pepper's Ghost, also using Grid
resources and suitable middleware (WP6).
