Proposal

Narrative

NOTE: The programs mentioned in this proposal will be located at the Fort Lauderdale campus instead of the Davie Campus. The proposals are not impacted by this relocation.

There are new methods for visual effects and compositing that make use of game engines and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to do high-end computations required for photorealistic results and turbo-charged rendering speed. This Spring 2020 I am teaching DIG 4394C Advanced Digital Compositing for Animation and will implement these new methodologies for visual effects and computer graphics imaging through the course. Since there is no longer any render farm and because students seem to prefer their own laptops over the aging workstations in our labs I propose to use external GPUs that can be connected via a high performance USB-C port to either their personal laptops or existing lab computers. This is cost effective compared to replacing workstations. The benefits of adding this option will help students create professional caliber short films, animation, high performance real-time games, and game cinematics. The added rendering speed will allow for students and faculty to produce multiple iterations of their work quickly so that they can potentially get to the final polished stage of production instead of waiting for days, weeks or even longer to see if their efforts are working towards their goals. The eGPU hardware consists of a small enclosure that connects to a USB-C port and a GPU that is capable of raytraced rendering in real time through a game engine such as Unreal or Unity 3D. Aside from the compositing course other classes in experimental film, documentary film, game cinematics, and interactive media that are offered throughout the Film, Video, and Multimedia sequence will benefit from this upgrade through improved professional results.

Facilities

Hardware Requirements

Only to provide a USB-C card to existing computers with PCI-e harware slots. $29 per machine.

Software Requirements

None that I know of; Adobe, Autodesk software use Open CL and nVidia CUDA drivers for rendering as is.

Personnel Costs

None.

Other Costs

None.

Timeline

The e GPUs can be assembled quickly. Half a Day to assemble for all units, another half day or so to test with existing software.

Sustainability

This will enable students to use their own laptops instead of refurbishing or replacing classroom lab workstations which are 5 years old in the animation labs at the Davie campus, ES 411 and the MFA lab ES 402. Of course we need to have some workstations replaced in the near future, but this answers a critical issue for rendering animation, films, and visual effects in a fraction of what it will be to replace all workstations in the ES computer classrooms.

Resource Matching

None.

Implementing Organization

FAU School of Communication and Multimedia Studies.