Blur Studio was handed quite a task: produce a trailer for the video game Tabula Rasa in just three and a half months, from storyboard to final delivery. Tabula Rasa, a massive multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) by designer Richard Garriott (famed for developing the classic Ultima series of games) and produced by Destination Games and NCsoft, needed a flashy, animated intro to the game and there wasn’t much time to produce it. So the game designers turned to Blur, an animation and visual effects studio in Venice, California that has a wealth of experience developing trailers and cut scenes for games, as well as visual effects for Hollywood productions.

Blur took the real-time game assets developed by Destination Games and “up-rezed” them. Maintaining the look and feel of the game, but with a higher-visual quality than is possible with real-time rendering. With the original game assets in hand, Blur would storyboard the trailer for the game, which is about the remnants of the human race fighting an alien menace on a distant planet, and produce the final animated sequence.

But to finish the trailer on time, Blur would need highly capable systems that could render complex scenes quickly and not hang with memory errors and other technical glitches when handling the large and complex models.

For the rendering horsepower, Blur turned to NVIDIA® and its partner, system builder BOXX Technologies and obtained forty 3DBOXX™ 8300 workstations, each with dual Intel 5355 quad-core 2.66 GHz processors, 8 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4600 graphics card.

As is usually the case in studio environments, the machines served as artist workstations during the day and doubled as nodes on the render farm at night. With scenes as large as one million polygons per frame, the 8 GB of RAM was key to the handling the large models and images used in the production and the Quadro boards drove the workstations’ dual monitors at high resolution and refresh rates without a hitch.

The systems’ power would also enable more advanced effects, like highly detailed shadow maps and global illumination effects, that would give the scenes a level of realism seldom achieved in the game market.

“The capabilities of the BOXX/NVIDIA systems just blew us away,” says Blur Studio CG Supervisor Kevin Margo. “The systems handled the largest images at cranked up resolutions like butter.”

The high-end Boxx workstations with Quadro graphics were able to render the images four times faster than their previous systems. This significantly increased artist productivity by reducing the waiting time for renders and speeding the digital dailies process. Memory faults and errors, usually common in production environments handling models this large, essentially disappeared, further speeding production.

One mark of the superiority of the BOXX workstations with NVIDIA Quadro graphics was that technical issues with rendering and displaying the digital intermediates and finals did not end up driving the schedule. The artists at Blur could focus on producing the best quality animation rather than worry about whether systems would limit what they could do in the allotted time. “Despite the short schedule, it was one of the more relaxed and low-stress projects we’ve worked on in a while,” concludes Margo.