DreamWorks, SGI, HP, Animation
But more-sophisticated algorithms call for greater computing power. For "Shark Tale", more than 300,000 frames were created during production, and each frame required more than 40 hours to render.
The production used more than 30TB of disk space -- the equivalent of 54,000 data CDs -- and more than five miles of film.
But the biggest advance for which animators pray is speed.
DreamWorks continually updates its processors so animators can get instant feedback on changes to a scene. More than 2,000 processors and more than 6 million CPU hours were used to render "Shark Tale".
Increasingly, the computers used to produce rich animated graphics are becoming generic, industry watchers say. Some animation studios used to use Silicon Graphics machines powered by a proprietary Unix system. But now, studios including DreamWorks and Industrial Light and Magic are moving to Linux-powered machines.
For "Shrek 2", DreamWorks took a novel step toward licensing computational power from Hewlett-Packard. The company effectively rented HP computers in the final three months of production, when it needed more rendering muscle. Still, the dominant cost for making a feature-length animated film is for labour, not computing power.
Clearing some of the technical hurdles, animators now must ensure that the design of characters is appealing to viewers. Rendering human beings is so complex -- moviegoers watch the effects with an unconscious scrutiny -- that many creators opt for stylized or fictional characters such as monsters or animals.
"The computer graphics explosion is ideally yet to come, when we make human characteristics more organic," says Nick Foster, DreamWorks' head of animation software.
As of 1990, visual effects were still done photochemically. Back then, it was an uncertainty whether computers could produce realistic human characters, but PCs were used to create some hard-surface objects such as spaceships in the original "Star Wars" trilogy.
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