300 million + “building blocks” to build a city, the technological power behind the “super project”

February 5, 2021 Savior

The Spring Festival is the warmest and most festive festival in the hearts of Chinese people. But have you ever thought about creating a city in the game world to celebrate the Spring Festival?

Recently, a team of gamers named "SuperNova" (hereinafter referred to as SuperNova), in the 3D sandbox game "Minecraft", with the blessing of Lenovo's industrial-grade computing power, used more than 300 million pixel cubes to restore The whole Wuhan city.

In the end, this "pixel" version of Wuhan City will meet with you in "My River City World". This is also the first domestic game player-made new year micro-film this year. It is specially selected to be "released" on the New Year’s Eve, for all those who love life. Go for warmth and strength.

The film only lasts more than five minutes, but for young creators, this is actually a "super project" with an arduous and unimaginable task.

10 classic landmarks: site visits, the ultimate restoration

In the "Minecraft" game, most "building party" players are directly looking at the online map to build the city.

However, in order to maximize the beauty of urban architecture and reflect the vigorous vitality, the team personally came to Wuhan with Lenovo's suggestion and invitation to truly feel the local customs. They walked into the streets and lanes, urban commercial circles, and old buildings in residential areas to learn about culture and history and survey and map buildings on site.

The landmark is the living history of the city. Therefore, in this video, we can see various famous landmarks that carry the modernity and history of Wuhan: the majestic and majestic Yellow Crane Tower, the Wuhan Railway Station, which has been awarded the "World's Most Beautiful Building", and the ancient architectural features of European and Asian religious Desi…

▲ Wuhan Jianghanguan Building

The team also walked into Lenovo's Wuhan factory to visit the 5G+IoT (Internet of Things) automated assembly benchmark-Quantum Wire, how the combination of 5G and the Internet of Things doubled production efficiency and intuitively felt the powerful productivity of modern smart factories , And the vitality behind this productivity. These scenes are also presented in the works by Lenovo and SuperNova.

▲ Lenovo Wuhan Factory

8 super large single buildings: grand landscape, detailed presentation

After the team came to visit Wuhan on the spot, they also had higher expectations and requirements for the restoration of Wuhan. With Lenovo's computing power, they broke the traditional maximum viewing distance of 64 blocks in Minecraft, and also broke the building's maximum space limit of 256 tiles.

Specifically, the team produced all the elements in the city in large proportions, not only the size is larger, the granularity is higher, the details are also expressed more clearly, and even close to the photographic quality. These are all for reflecting the majesty of the building while taking into account every detail, making it more delicate and real.

▲ Wuhan Gude Temple

For example, the 72 columns of the Yellow Crane Tower, 60 angled corners flying outwards, and tens of thousands of yellow glazed tiles on the roof have all been finely restored. It is said that it has also become the most restored ancient in the history of the "Minecraft" game. One of the buildings.

The details are not limited to the building itself. In the well-known snack street "Hubu Alley", when people on the side of the road pick up a bowl of old Wuhan hot dry noodles, they can even see the steaming heat made with pixel particles popping up. The details can achieve this level. It's really amazing.

500+ characters, 20+ night scenes: smooth animation, stunning light effects

A vigorous city cannot do without the people in the city. This "Pixel Wuhan City" has also joined people from all walks of life: from the shops hanging lanterns in the alleys of Old Hankou, to the urban hipsters shopping and playing with drones, to the Lenovo factory in Optics Valley, a group of " "The hitman" checks every smart product in an orderly manner…Compared with the pixel cities made by other players, the richness of the characters and the smoothness and naturalness of the movements are refreshing.

Changing from "static" to "moving" is like a complete upgrade. It takes a lot of effort behind the "real" presentation.

This is a very test of the computer's mechanism cooperation in modeling and action design. There are almost no players in the "Minecraft" circle to try, but because of the powerful computing power support, this linkage has the opportunity to be presented in a more vivid way. Out. And some of the images in the video also use motion capture technology, which makes the actions of the villain in the factory more lifelike, the robotic arm can also rotate freely, and the scenes and images look more dynamic.

In addition, the production of light and shadow is also a test of technical ability. The presentation of dynamic light effects in traditional games of Minecraft is generally limited and blunt, but the lighting and shadows here seem to be directly recorded by the camera, making the whole work more agile.

When the traffic is constantly flowing, the fireworks are blooming, and the lights are flickering, the rendering costs of tens of millions of facade scenes are "burning", but Lenovo's computing power can keep these lights and shadows in such large-scale renderings to maintain a smoother and realistic effect . Therefore, when the sunset passes by the car body of the street and fireworks illuminate the smiling faces of people, people can feel the happy and happy Spring Festival atmosphere, and a pixel city with "ambience" and "dramatic emotion" is slowly born.

6000+ frame images, 4K image quality: the entire city is reproduced clearly

The entire video can present such a smooth and clear effect, which is inseparable from the high frame rate of the picture and the rendering ability behind it. It is reported that the team produced more than 6000 4K-level images in the later period, and the city coverage reached 20 square kilometers. Finally, they can show the whole picture of Wuhan in their hearts.

Lenovo and SuperNova have also uniquely set many easter eggs in the film, which greatly increases the fun of watching movies. Each QR code has a story behind it. Thanks to the 4K ultra-clear image quality, they can be accurately scanned by mobile phones.

The amount of urban scene construction is too vast. Restoring every building, every life scene, every day and night picture, and smart character animation requires a lot of time, energy, cost, and the support of large-scale equipment and technology.

In the final stage of video production, with 4K image quality like this, it takes only 20 minutes to render a frame in traditional production. However, with the blessing of Lenovo's computing power, the rendering efficiency has increased to an average of 3 minutes per frame, which greatly shortens the production time. The rendering took only two weeks to complete. The main technical support behind this is the computing power solution based on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations.

Lenovo said that in the future, it will continue to call on and use computing power to support all MC players who love life, use technology to tap the vitality of the city, and build their own understanding and perception in the MC game brick by brick.

The technological power behind "Super Engineering" is also the vane of the real world

This unprecedented work exists because of the union of Lenovo, players, and Wuhan.

With the help of Lenovo's computing power, the entire process of setting, modeling, motion capture, special effects, and rendering, the impossible "super project" in the minds of team members was finally completed in only one month.

The high degree of restoration of the details of the city, the real atmosphere created by sound, shadow and light effects, and the careful reproduction of the life fragments of Wuhan residents. These unknown places are the reasons why people can be truly moved when they watch the video of "Pixel Wuhan". It will make people gradually forget that this city is all made of squares, but is like a documentary showing the life stories of ordinary people in Wuhan.

This is not only an unprecedented innovation in the "Minecraft" game circle, for people in front of the screen, they can also feel the charm of the combination of game, technology, and urban innovation.

As the name implies, "computing power" refers to the computing power of the device. It can not only assist in game and video creation, but also assist in aerospace and military manufacturing, and is closely related to our future.

Lenovo’s "computing power" is mainly reflected in two aspects: one is that supercomputing will provide unprecedentedly powerful computing power to process massive amounts of data at high speed; on the other hand, cloud computing data centers and edge computing that integrate server, storage and network capabilities Sensors, routers and micro servers will make computing power ubiquitous.

Therefore, computing power is the future productivity.

▲ Lenovo Wuhan Factory

We have experienced the agricultural era, when the productive forces were human physical ability; in the industrial and post-industrial era, science and technology became the primary productive forces, and capital and technology were driving the rapid economic development.

In the digital information age, emerging Internet technologies have begun to create brand-new business models and development platforms. Next, we are heading toward an intelligent era where everything is interconnected and everything can be calculated.

In the era of intelligence, computing power will be the primary productive force.

This year, we have clearly felt the explosion of online education, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and the "cloud industry", along with the processing of massive amounts of data and complex scenarios.

As the power of data intelligence, computing power will help promote the transformation of every industry.

As early as 2011, Lenovo started the road of intelligent transformation with data intelligence as the core. In 2020, Lenovo proposed "New IT".

New IT (Intelligent Transformation) refers to the provision of technologies, services and comprehensive solutions covering all elements of "end-edge-cloud-network-intelligence" for the intelligent transformation of industries and enterprises in the era of intelligence.

The "end" here refers to the intelligent IoT device terminal, "edge" refers to edge computing, "cloud" refers to cloud computing, "network" refers to the data transmission network represented by 5G, and "intelligence" refers to industry intelligence solution.

The combination of them will not only promote the intelligent transformation of the enterprise, but also increase the productivity of the enterprise. This productivity will also bring more possibilities to everyone's life.

Just last year, Lenovo also provided BGI researchers with the latest big data analysis technology and computing resources, shortening the time of scientific research and clinical observation, and assisting the development of the new crown vaccine.

Just like Lenovo's computing power helps SuperNova realize its dreams and help the development of new crown vaccines-when technology and humanities are combined, the value of technology can truly enter people's lives and create more warmth for life.

Lenovo is using computing power to build the dream of ordinary people, and is also using intelligent layout to achieve a future that meets our needs.