Tesseract
Rob Hays

	An Amazing Computing exclusive first look at a new LightWave
rendering engine.

	Time is the most precious commodity, because there is never
enough. No group of people is more conscious of this fact than
those who use their computer for 3-D rendering. And of this
group, time becomes absolutely critical for those who make their
living doing 3-D rendering for video productions. A single 30
second clip contains 900 individual frames, each of which can
require up to several hours of time on the fastest Amiga.
	When NewTek un-bundled the LightWave rendering program from
the Video Toaster, users were free to split time-consuming
rendering jobs between multiple machines, without equipping each
Amiga with a Toaster. The next step was made possible by the
development of the ScreamerNet (figure 1), which uses standard
EtherNet hardware and TCP/IP networking software, to allow the
Amiga to control the rendering process on the networked
machine(s). The actual mathematics of the rendering job could now
be assigned to non-Amigas, with ScreamerNet handling the file
transfers between machines. This helped, but there is nothing
like raw horsepower to crunch numbers ever faster.
	The top-of-the-line in today's CPU designs, when it comes to
raw processing speed, are the RISC chips. Compared to the 680x0
series in your Amiga, these chips process fewer different
machine instructions. This means less time is spent decoding
commands, and all commands that are used are the same length,
further reducing bottlenecks. As this new generation of CPU chips
becomes more widely available, NewTek has begun releasing
versions of LightWave that can take advantage of all of their
power.
	Recently, all of these changes have begun to come together.
With the release of several systems designed around the RISC CPU,
and rendering LightWave files across the ScreamerNet, a new term
has come into the vocabulary, "render farm". This is a group of
up to 8 dedicated rendering engines using ScreamerNet, that can
be put to work simultaneously on a single project. You may have
seen the advertisements for such systems, all using
dinosaur-sounding names. The most recent entry into this field
has not only upped the price:performance ratio, but has also
moved the naming conventions from the Jurassic era into the next
century.
	The Tesseract, from KC Enterprises Ltd. / Digital Arts,
takes its name from a science fiction term that denotes the
ability to bypass the normal three-dimensional space by moving
through the fourth dimension of time. Don't worry though, an
understanding of this esoteric phenomena is definitely not
required to save yourself serious amounts of rendering time.
	The Tesseract consists of a 100 MHZ MIPS R4600 RISC CPU,
with 32 megabytes of zero wait state RAM. 133 MHZ and 150 MHZ
versions will be available as soon as those CPUs start shipping
in quantity. A double speed CD-ROM drive, 500 megabyte hard disk,
and 1.44 megabyte floppy handle data and program storage. I/O
ports include 2 serial, 1 parallel, Ethernet, and Fast SCSI-2.
Cased in a black mini-tower, a keyboard, 15" monitor, mouse,
video display board, and WindowsNT complete the workstation. Non-
workstation render farm models are also available.
	Basically, any Amiga can be used to control the rendering
operations, so long as it is capable of running LightWave, and
has an EtherNet interface. As of this writing, December 1994,
NewTek has yet to release a stand-alone LightWave for the MIPS
chip. So, for now, you need an Amiga, but this will surely change
in the future.
	What kind of time can be saved with the Tesseract? Figure 2
shows a rather simple scene that required 76 seconds to render on
a 25MHZ A-4000/40. The same scene rendered on the Tesseract
required 8 seconds of rendering time. On a 30 second animation,
this is a difference of seventeen hours. The difference is even
more dramatic for a complicated scene such as Figure 3. Each
frame of this animation required approximately six hours on the
A-4000. The Tesseract needed less than an hour and a half per
frame. A 30 second animation would take more than seven months
of rendering time on our Amiga, but could be shown after about
seven weeks using the Tesseract.
	On the simple scene, more time is actually spent waiting for
the ScreamerNet to perform file transfers than is taken up by the
rendering operations. Due to the way ScreamerNet operates, the
file transfer times remain nearly constant regardless of the
complexity of the scene to be rendered. Also, the current version
of ScreamerNet prohibits use of LightWave while rendering is
going on. While this is not a problem with the simple types of
scenes, when you start doing complex scenes, this is time you
could put to use planning or designing your next frame. Included
with the Tesseract is some proprietary software to take care of
this problem. This software works with ScreamerNet, and allows
you to return to LightWave as soon as the file transfer to the
Tesseract has taken place. When the rendering operation is
completed, control is returned to ScreamerNet, which transfers
the scene back to the Amiga and sends the next frame to the
Tesseract.
	At $5975 the Tesseract is not for the casual user. However,
for those who make their living rendering LightWave scenes, the
added rendering speed coupled with having LightWave returned to
your use while rendering, means the Tesseract is money in the
bank.
	For further information, contact KC Enterprises Ltd. /
Digital Arts at 1-800-692-6442.

Captions for illustrations

PHOTO:	The Tesseract 100
FIGURE 1:	The ScreamerNet Control Panel
FIGURE 2:	NewTek demo scene. Rendered at default settings
FIGURE 3:	Scene courtesy of Animation House, Inc. Evansville, IN.
		Rendered with ray-traced shadows, reflections, and 
		refractions. Rendered at medium resolution with low
		anti-aliasing.
