Academy Award-winning visual effects (VFX) studio Framestore officially opened its doors in Mumbai at the end of 2021. The state-of-the-art facility supported a team of just over 100 working on projects such as Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and Sony’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Just over two years later, the studio has nearly quadrupled in size while continuing to deliver blockbuster visuals for films like the recently released “Wonka.” To support this tremendous growth, the studio added a second wing outfitted with advanced technology, including 500 HP Z4 Rack workstations with Intel ® Xeon ® W-2295 processors.
Global collaboration
As part of the connected Framestore network, the Mumbai studio often shares shots across global sites, including its London, Montreal, Vancouver and Melbourne offices. It also collaborates with the London studio on virtual production projects; Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” was the first undertaking. For the LED volume shoot, the Mumbai team optimized and enhanced backgrounds provided by the client.
“We were still working from home at the time of the Pandemic, and our global Systems team did a phenomenal job setting that up for us so that we could remote into London’s pipeline,” explained Mumbai CG Supervisor Prashant Nair, who oversees early assets and development, shot production and bridges communications between different global creative and technology teams at Framestore, and with the Supervisors globally.
As a company, Framestore uses industry-standard tools including Autodesk Maya, Foundry’s Nuke, SideFX’s Houdini, Boris FX’s Silhouette, and Adobe Creative Suite, and data is synced between locations based on project scope. Most of the Mumbai studio’s rendering is done using thousands of CPU cores in an on-premises data center; artists also run render previews and accelerate VFX simulations locally on both the CPU and GPU of the Z by HP workstations.
Responsible for the Mumbai studio’s local IT infrastructure and latest upgrade, Mumbai’s Head of Technical Operations Manpreet Singh shared, “We standardized on Z by HP workstations from day one since they offer the best configurations. They’re rack-based so we can manage them remotely, including automatic start-up or shut-down, implement upgrades, and assign assets to different users.”.
The HP Z4 Rack workstation configuration comprised:
– Intel ® Xeon ® W-2295 processors (18 cores, 3.0 GHz/4.8 GHz)
– NVIDIA RTX A4000 GPU
– 64GB RAM
– HP Z Turbo Drive 512GB SSD
– HP Z Turbo Drive 1TB SSD
From under the sea to outer space
Disney’s live action “The Little Mermaid” was another early project for the Mumbai team. The studio worked on several underwater scenes featuring Ariel, her sisters, and various sea creatures, which required layers of simulations to pull off. The team worked on a similarly complex scene for “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which featured a massive stampede. With its new upgraded Z by HP workstations, tackling such challenging, compute intensive shots is simpler and faster to execute.
“Faster computing has really helped us to share the results of our work more quickly with the director or VFX supervisor. This also enables faster iterations. We can better understand what they’re looking for, then push the boundaries creatively and technically to enable artists to nail notes at earlier stages in a show,” said Nair.
The creature stampede sequence in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” required complex animation and effects. Using Z by HP workstations allowed artists to layer the different departments’ work at various stages to better gauge the shot overall. “We were able to turn around these early accurate preview versions in days and secure approvals, which saved a lot of time and resources,” Nair noted.
Mumbai’s boosted compute power was also helpful in creating a recent Framestore project that required CG lava. The close up shot featured a character falling into the lava, causing a splash. Creating the compute intensive sequence required interactive simulations which ran seamlessly on the Z4 workstations powered by Intel ®.
“Having high performance computing, storage, and networking gives us a competitive edge, considering how often we’re running compute-hungry applications to produce the caliber of VFX that our clients demand,” said Singh.
Future-proof computing power
Artists in the Mumbai studio are currently in production on a high-profile CG character-heavy project. “The Z by HP workstations give a big boost to our creative department, and have been helpful from pre-production to final comp,” explained Nair.
“We’ve seen gains in Shader authoring, material editing, user interactive shots, interactive rendered viewport, particle effects and a range of simulations including: fluid, rigid body, muscles, cloth and fur, and even playback. We also use them for photogrammetry and the interactive denoising of renders. With the right compute framework in place, the studio has the capacity to continue elevating its output, even as clients up the ante creatively and technically,” he concluded.
For more information on Z by HP workstations, visit: hp.com/z .
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