Texas Tech Library Is Really Animated

Things are moving at Texas Tech University’s library. Long a repository for the static printed page, the library has shaken things up this month by opening a 3-D animation lab.

“Animation is not just storytelling. It’s about teaching and learning,” says Jim C. Brewer, the librarian for systems administration and integration at Texas Tech. College libraries, he says, have always been centers for such resources, “so animation labs, I think, will be common library features in five years.”

By seeing how things move in three dimensions, Mr. Brewer says, people can get a better sense of the complicated interaction of particles in high-energy physics; by recreating historical battle scenes, people can explore those scenarios on a deeper level.

The lab has eight high-performance Apple computers and a collection of industry-standard animation software. The computers have Vue Infinite for designing landscapes and animals, Poser for the human figure, AutoCAD for drafting and rendering, and several more packages. The university is hiring two professional animators to teach faculty members and students how to use them.

One problem in getting more faculty members and students to use animation is that it is very computer-intensive: The standard desktop computer will get bogged down.

Texas Tech’s answer is to connect the animation programs to the campus computing grid. Administrators are experimenting with a program called Condor, which will take one animation job and break it up into 3000 small jobs, sending each one to a separate computer on the grid. The small jobs run in the background, and Condor reassembles them into a finished package. That way, an animation sequence that would take days to assemble on one computer can be finished in a matter of hours.—Josh Fischman