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by Katherine Edmond
As IT manager for Weta in the early 2000s, InterGrid founder Scott Houston oversaw the provision of processing capacity to cope with increasingly complex special effects shots in the films.
With 10 weeks before The Return of the King had to be finished, the most challenging shot of the trilogy arrived for rendering – the process of generating an image from 3D data stored in a computer.
“Our staff and computers were already working around the clock when we got this scene from the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. We had to go out and buy 1,000 extra computers to do it. Hiring simply wasn’t an option back in 2003 but it meant we ended up with a huge amount of processing capacity that wouldn’t be needed until King Kong.”
Houston was instrumental in Weta teaming up with Telecom subsidiary Gen-I to establish a rentable supercomputing facility with the additional capacity.
He later established his own company, Intergrid, which has access to over 3,000 processors worldwide. The service helps companies speed up design times and render media files to meet tight deadlines. Businesses submit their files securely over the internet and get the job processed quickly, only paying – by credit card – for the time they use.
The power of Intergrid’s supercomputing service is also embedded in the open source creative software Blender which is widely used by film animators around the world. Blender users simply enter a username and password and, at the click of a button, can send their files for rendering.
Houston says Intergrid is supporting the significant international growth in the film animation industry.“In places like China they are training up to 200,000 graphic artists a year who work for comparatively low wages. Film companies want to have their animation drawn there but want high end rendering completed in a safe and secure environment. That’s what we can offer.”
More information:
www.intergrid.co.nz
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