[GameBreaker64]

Ever wondered which SGI machines were used to animate the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? The answer is interesting.

Several months ago I met, or rather, became fast friends with Steve "Spaz" Williams, the pioneer computer animator who rebelled against the suits at Industrial Light and Magic to model and animate the Rex and Raptors in Spielberg's blockbuster. Don't let the film's end credits fool you. Phil Tippet as "Dinosaur Supervisor" is a misnomer. Steve, who is just about the most honest person I've ever known, directed Jurassic's animation and personally handled 15 of the 50 (not 80) CG shots in the film. Oh yeah, the DID that the stop motion animators used? Steve called it the "DIDn't", because the data it provided to Softimage was useless for practical purposes. It provided great key poses (by Randy Dutra) for only 4 shots.

Alright, now on to the main topic of this post. the 420 Indigo. Yes, it existed. As Steve told me, ILM had special hybrid machines for animation. The 420 Indigo was a combination of a 420 VGX and an IRIS Indigo. Steve had one in his office (the famous "Pit") and it served as ILM's primary animation workstation until the O2 era.

Hope some of you found this post interesting.

Eli Santin

[Irinikus]

This must be a similar type of machine (4D/420VGX), as it seems to be pretty rare: (I've only been able to find this example of this machine on the internet)

[jan-jaap]

Some screen shots from "The making of" from the DVD of "Jurassic Park": http://sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/j...l#makingof

This shows a room full of what looks like twin tower PowerSeries, mostly. If the skins reflect what's inside, most would have VGX graphics (blue top) or GTX graphics (red). I spot at least one single tower PowerSeries GTX as well. It shows RGB (monitor) cables attached to some, and terminals attached to others. If you're going to use a room full of PowerSeries for rendering frames then you might as well pull the graphics out in order to reduce heat generation.

'420' probably refers to the CPU configuration: a 4D/420, a single IP15 CPU board with dual 40MHz R3000's, the fastest you could get before Crimson arrived. The PowerSeries chassis will take two IP15 boards though, which gives you a lot more CPU power per unit floor space. That would be a 4D/440. I happen to have one of those. It is not possible in any way to install an Indigo CPU board in a PowerSeries chassis. If you wanted a single CPU board it would be a PowerSeries IP9 board, but that would terrible in terms of space or power efficiency. The other way around (a PowerSeries CPU board in an Indigo) is laughable. I mean, just look.

It was possible to order the Crimson with the graphics of an Indigo: the Crimson Elan. The Crimson (IP17) firmware has support for this. The PowerSeries IP5/IP7/IP9/IP15 firmware does not. The old Alias software I've seen is also hard-coded to the graphics hardware, like VGX or GTX. I'm pretty sure the combination IP15-Elan is not in there either.

Everything before the Indy was commonly called an "IRIS". There was the "Professional IRIS", it's little brother "Personal IRIS", the PowerSeries has badges that said e.g. "IRIS 4D/420 VGX" etc. The Indigo was the "IRIS Indigo". It's been 30 years since Jurassic Park, I wouldn't be surprised if the '420 Indigo' really was an IRIS 4D/420. It would make a good system to review rendered frames: you don't need 4 or more CPUs for that. It would make sense for key people to have the fastest CPU (qualified for Alias software!) though, and in 1991/1992 that would have been the 40MHz R3000 IP15.

---

This must be a similar type of machine (4D/420VGX), as it seems to be pretty rare: (I've only been able to find this example of this machine on the internet)

That looks like a 4D/420VGX, or a '320 maybe, but the skins are from a PowerSeries 210 GTX (red top).

I happen to have a real 4D/420VGX in a single tower chassis, though I installed a second CPU board so now it's technically a 4D/440VGX. Systems with VGX graphics have blue top hats:


This is what's inside. The IP15 boards are roughly in the middle, with the black handles. If this would have been a 'factory' 4D/440 it probably also would have had a flat cable from the second CPU board to the bulkheads to connect extra serial ports.


Otherwise, this system has (on the left) two VME option cards: an FDDI board and a SCSI card (narrow high voltage differential, never found anything that could attach to it). This one also has dual raster managers (right hand side, with the row of LEDs) which makes it a 10-span VGX.

Oh, fun fact: I have the original invoice for this system. I think it was well over 200.000DM, after discounts, with a single IP15 board, a single RM and 'only' 24MB RAM (still a lot in 1991, but now it has 256MB). I think the RAM alone cost 1000DM per MB.

I think this is one of my coolest SGI systems. I rebuilt the PSU a couple of years ago, but otherwise it never gave me any problems and it still works fine, despite being > 30 years old.

[GameBreaker64]

That's an awesome machine jan!

In regards to the DVD documentary, Steve told me ILM 's render farm at that time was full of 320 and 340 VGX machines. The 420 Indigo was the main modeling and animation system. R$endering equipment was more off the shelf. Steve often serenaded the rendering machines with his bagpipes on Fridays"so they wouldn't crash".

Eli Santin

[gmcenroe]

I worked for a biotech company in the 1990s and we had a Crimson workstation. I remember when we bought it from SGI, our company was also in Mountain View and we shared a parking lot with early Sun Microsystems Buildding, there were many options and price points depending on how powerful a system you wanted to put together. I think we had a midlevel configuration, its been a long time. Later we merged with another company on the east coast that moved to our site. They had a molecular modeling group and programmers who wrote code for special purposes beyond what was available on the market for chemical research, at that time. We ran it on an SGI computer that was the size of a refrigerator (Power Series?). I think that it had 8 processors and probably cost a bundle. At that time it was the most powerful SGI computer that you could buy. That was what got me interested in SGI, plus the fact that they were a legend at that time for high end graphics workstations. In reality though the software at that time for molecular modeling was not that great, but it was good for generating lots of animations and pretty pictures of you small molecule bound to a receptor or enzyme in an x-ray crystal structure. It was also used for homology modeling where you had a known structure of a protein and a new similar protein for instance from another species, mouse vs. human and one tried to create a model for the new protein from the previously known structure that had been through crystallography. It was a lot of fun.