To record a game demo (raw 3D scene and commands related to a game in progress):
Enter the game console by pressing the ~ tilde key
Type DEMOREC and then press enter; this starts the demo recording
Press the ESC key to exit (get rid of) the game console window
Play the game...
To stop recording enter the game console again and then type STOPDEMO
Demo files are stored in the C:\UT2004\Demos although you play them back from within the game as detailed below...
To play back (view) the demo or convert a demo into an AVI movie:
Select COMMUNITY from the main UT2004 screen
Click the DEMO button, and then select the name of your demo file
Choose to play back the demo (render in real time) or convert it into an AVI format movie
To play back a movie switch out of the game and open the C:\UT2004\UserMovies folder, then open the video in a media player such as QuickTime, MediaPlayer, etc.
The typical Hollywood movie that uses special effects will consume more than 1,000,000 (1 million) hours of rendering time, and animated features (ala Shrek) take more. For rendering of films large collections of computers are used at once, so called “render farms”, to allow several thousand computers to crunch the rendering data (3D scene data) at the same time. Shrek 2, for example, was rendered on a render farm that consisted of over 1,000 computers running in parallel.
Consider the rendering required for the ship that is in Poseidon (released in 2006). Watch a few of the trailers for the Poseidon movie at one (or all) of the following sites, but spend no more than 10 minutes total viewing them; you'll need a current version Apple Quicktime to watch the trailers which you can get at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
In total, the all-digital Poseidon ship consisted of 181,595 renderable parts such as rails, hull, windows, cabins, swimming pools, lounge chairs, tables, lifeboats and so forth. 11GB (gigabytes) of textures alone were used! In total it took a team of 80 visual effects artists one year to create the ship and the water that surrounds it; the water on which the ship floats, and is eventually capsized by, is also computer generated. In other words, the ship and water alone took 80 people years to create (80 people working full time for a year).
EXERCISE: Take a close look at the ship in the movie Poseidon. Spend no more than 10 minutes viewing the movie trailers at one of the following sites:
http://poseidonmovie.warnerbros.com
http://movies.aol.com/movie/poseidon-2006/21652/trailer
The Poseidon ship shown in the trailers is entirely computer generated. Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) is a term used to describe film and video content (such as this ship).
EXERCISE: Spend 5 minutes reading
about CGI at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-generated_imagery
Shrek 2 is an “animated feature” (a feature film that is entirely constructed and animated using computers, unlike Poseidon which contains a large amount of traditional shots creating with traditional film cameras). A rendering farm consisting of over 1,000 computers was used to rendered Shrek 2
EXERSISE: Spend 10 minutes viewing the trailers for Shrek 2. You'll have to explore the following site to find them: http://www.shrek2.com/
Render farms are expensive to build and maintain, and typically cost over $1,000,000 (one million dollars) a year in terms of cost of ownership (the cost to build and maintain them). Render farms are also private: they belong to the companies that build them.
In contrast, the Media Grid http://MediaGrid.org gives the general public access to rendering farms. The Media Grid is a public utility for digital media. Based on new and emerging technologies, the Media Grid builds upon existing Internet and Web standards to create an open network optimized for digital media delivery, storage, and processing. Applications enabled by the Media Grid include: on-demand digital cinema and interactive movies; film and movie rendering; truly immersive multiplayer games and virtual reality; real-time visualization of complex data (weather, medical, engineering, and so forth); telepresence and telemedicine (remote surgery, medical imaging, drug design, etc.); vehicle and aircraft design and simulation; and similar high-performance applications that produce or consume digital media.
The Media Grid does not replace or circumvent existing grids, clusters, or rendering farms—it provides uniform and simplified access over the public Internet to a wide range of such systems which, in turn provide services to the Media Grid for a fee. The Media Grid makes it easy for developers to access computational resources provided by utility computing vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) over the public Internet.
EXERCISE: Spend 10 minutes reading about the Media Grid at http://MediaGrid.org
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