Be a Great Boss: The Hill Collection (4 Items)

Creative Abrasion

131

They were always looking for cheaper, better, faster ways of providing the

compute power the Pixar filmmakers needed.

One option was to render frames overnight on the hundreds of

powerful desktop computers—thousands of CPUs, actually, because each

computer had four—that sat on Pixar employees’ desks. In fact, Pixar had

used employees’ computers this way in the early 1990s to complete Toy

Story on time. But this was years later, and CG technology had grown so

much more complicated that there weren’t enough hours each night to ren-

der many of the frames. Artists would either have to wait the next morning

while their desktops finished rendering or cancel the rendering and lose all

the work done overnight.