You can now add "movie producer" to the list of Sun credits as the company is helping produce the new 3D animated film "Big Buck Bunny" by providing Network.com's Sun Grid compute utility service that offers compute infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis at $1/CPU-hr. Network.com is one of the web hosting locations for the online comedy created using open source 3D software suite Blender.

The movie promotes open content creation as it is not only developed using open source software but also distributed under an open license that gives artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files used to make the movie. The community of animators who created the movie reportedly needed hundreds of CPUs to run simultaneously in order to significantly speed up the movie rendering process. However, the team did not need or want to own the compute infrastructure to do that. This is where Sun's on-demand computing platform came in.

"We needed over fifty thousand CPU-hours of compute time, and Sun's Network.com grid service provided us a very powerful platform," said Ton Roosendaal, producer and Blender Institute director. "The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you would expect from large animation studios," he commented.

"The Big Buck Bunny movie project demonstrates that the barriers to entry in the 3D animation world can be lowered tremendously using on-demand computing platforms. Even though the Blender team did not have support of a big studio, they succeeded with the community support, an open source rendering software and an on-demand computing platform," said David Folk, Group Manager of Network.com Marketing, Sun. "With a growing collection of applications, a host of new developer tools and worldwide availability, Network.com is attracting more developers and end-users to use, build and share new services for a wide range of industries."

The movie about a well-tempered rabbit "Big Buck," who finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of three rodent bullies can be downloaded from http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download. In addition to the online release, Big Buck Bunny has been released in 35mm film format on DVD and Blu-ray. For more information, please visit http://www.bigbuckbunny.org.

The open source 3D software suite Blender is available from blender.org as well as the Network.com Application Catalog, which is a collection of online grid-enabled applications that can be used in an on-demand basis with "Click and Run" ease. [...read more...]

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