While Blue Sky Studios has delivered startlingly real images by the most subtle of means - the barely perceptible use of light - part of the big news for 2000 will be sheer computing horsepower that will allow even further advances in image making.

With the studio gearing up for feature film work, the requirement for speed and efficiency in its hardware configuration will be even greater. Blue Sky managing technical director John Donkin says one of the things the studio will do this year will be to invest in the new processors offered in Compaq Alpha architecture to be used for its rendering applications. "The processing power that is now becoming available with lower cost, higher performance machines allows us to do stuff at an affordable price," says Donkin. "We are getting in new hardware that will really increase the raw computing power of our facility and make it possible for us to do things we want to do but sometimes can't because of budgetary or time constraints."

The new machines represent an increase of about three-and-a-half times over the facility's current setup, which features SGI machines using R10000 processors. Donkin says the Alpha processor does well on the price and performance count.

The studio makes extensive use of its proprietary rendering software CGI Studio, which is partly responsible for some of the compelling images the studio has created, and which demands high-performance hardware to achieve. "Our rendering on projects is very compute intensive," says Donkin, "which gives us our particular look, which you can see in our films and commercials, Bunny being a notable example."

The short film Bunny, which won an Academy Award for Blue Sky last year, used a computer rendering technique called radiosity, one of the factors that gave the film its incredible, realistic look by delivering natural-looking lighting. Radiosity is a means of computing where and how light falls on objects indirectly, creating the subtle, warm realism of ambient light in a CG scene. Pushing that technology and applying it more and more to commercials is another thing on the 2000 to-do list, says Donkin. "We're looking at being able to make more use of our lighting model and the tools in our renderer in general," says Donkin. "We used radiosity on Bunny, and it's something we would conceivably use more on commercials. It's expensive computer-wise, it takes a lot of computer cycles to figure out all those computations, but with these newer, faster computers, it makes it more possible to be able to do this kind of thing."

For its workstation environment, Blue Sky will continue to use the high-end Unix-based SGI boxes, rather than make the switch to NT. "Although [NT] does very well on price and performance, we are a bit uncertain about its stability," says Donkin.

The studio is using Alias|Wavefront Maya for modeling and animation and is also working with LA-based Nothing Real's compositing package, Shake. Donkin says Shake is an effective tool for live-action integration as well as straight CG work, allowing film resolution compositing and work in a variety of different color spaces. Donkin also calls the package very "TD [technical director] friendly," providing a solid user front end, as well as scriptability to change that interface.

On the whole, Donkin says the year's challenges will be to build on the new level of character animation ushered in by projects like Star Wars Phantom Menace, and recently, Stuart Little. "It's one of the challenges that remains for the industry in general - to make characters that look natural; whether it's fur, hair, the way skin is rendered or the way cloth moves, it's going to be one of the exciting things to look forward to," he says, pointing again to the faster new computing architecture, which will help facilities to meet the challenges. Citing Stuart Little, Donkin says the move has been away from easier to reproduce dinosaurs and toys to characters that are "a bit more like what we're used to seeing in the real world."