Computers used for Hollywood movies

While viewing the 2nd DVD disc of Star wars III (behind the scens makings).
I was wondering. What kind of computers they used to process the graphics
and animation for the movie?

Apples
Suns (Alpha Sparc)
Silicon Graphics
or Intel based

On Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:35:05 -0500, "RDN" wrote:

While viewing the 2nd DVD disc of Star wars III (behind the scens makings).
I was wondering. What kind of computers they used to process the graphics
and animation for the movie?

Apples
Suns (Alpha Sparc)
Silicon Graphics
or Intel based


Industrial Light and Magic have used Silicon Graphics machines in the
past, but for the last little while, like most FX houses, they've been
shifting over to using x86 based machines running BSD or Linux -- it
was never specified whether Intel or AMD made the CPUs. There was an
article in one of the Linux magazines on it after Episode 2 showing
how they used Film-GIMP for Yoda. I'd imagine several other tools
were involved too. As good as GIMP is, it doesn't make sense for them
to rely on one single tool for everything.

You can find several articles about it on the net by googling "film
GIMP"

FYI, even the later Silicon graphics machines use x86 based CPUs
running some flavour of unix. I'm not sure if I'd consider the SGI
machines to be PC's though, as their machines are supposed to be
custom designed around the CPU, but deviating heavily from the typical
PC form factors.
---------------------------------------------
Thanks.


MCheu