The annual wrap-up for OSCON, Weta Digital's Operations Manager on the LOTR

In the final session of OSCON 2004, the lead IT guy for the Lord Rings movies presents the technical issues that they have run in to in the production of the LOTR movies.

Over the course of the project, they started with 80 people, 200 for the first film, 400 for the second and 500 artists for the third movie. They also went from 400 processors in the render farm to 3300 processors for the third movie. They also had to open a second office with a long hall 10 gigabit to the other office, which is the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere. Now that the movies are over they now have a chance to go back and look back on what happened.

The did hit problems with all of the data for one shot was on one filesystem and when 1400 procs want to talk with it, you have a problem. They designed a lightweight filesystem that sits on top of the filesystem to distribute the load. Data management was also a massive issue. The production team used FileMaker for everything, which had to be sucked out and plugged into various relational databases. The cheap hardware is great for raw computing power, the problem is you have two big problems: 1) licenses costs per proc and 2) cooling.

Because of not being able to kill horses, the did motion capture of the horses running and had to simulate them being hit by a giant flying nazgul. Also, Shelob was completely CG, they moved the eyes to the top of the head. They showed the Sam being attacked by shelob and it was a foam head with fangs being forced onto him by a guy completely covered in blue.

The final scene in in Mt. Doom was really difficult because of the lava. They just ran the scene a bunch of different ways and picked the best spots. The shot of nazgul flying towards white city that was showing in the trail took nine month from start to finish.

They are clearly pissed at RedHat for changing the licensing, and they having been on Redhat 7.3 for a variety of reasons. The cost of qualifying high end software against Linux as gone up a lot and now with the cost of Enterprise Server being so damn much. They might be looking at other platforms and it won’t begin with “W”, which I’m assuming will mean MacOSX or Solaris on 64bit x86.

The final extended version of LOTR: RotK will be coming out and it will have almost as many additional CG shots as were in the entire theatrical release RotK!