According to the school’s administrators, Smoky Hill High School in Aurora, Colorado, is one of only a handful of high schools in the nation to offer instruction in three-dimensional digital animation. For Smoky Hill students, that advantage leads to accelerated learning and a fast-track to careers in digital media.

“We have seniors working at internships before they ever enter college,” says Dan Cornell, digital media arts instructor at Smoky Hill. “Some of my students graduate high school with a level of proficiency comparable to recent college graduates.”

The use of HP workstations supports that proficiency. Cornell notes, “HP workstations are standard in the film industry. They’re also used at architectural firms and engineering labs and design shops all over the world.

“Many of my students dream of careers in video gaming or film, but I remind them that those industries are tiny compared to what’s out there. It’s a world of opportunity. Science, medicine, forensics, engineering– these fields all need talented digital media professionals. And the job market is only going to get bigger.”

HP workstations deliver power, reliability
HP workstations are powerful enough to deliver fast renderings, with virtually no slowdowns or lag time – a feature that Cornell says is invaluable to digital media, especially digital animation.
“Our previous computers had a lot of trouble with rendering. Students would sit and wait for their renders to be finished, and they couldn’t turn to other project or tasks until the render process was complete,” says Cornell. “There was a lot of down time. So we switched to HP workstations, which can handle highend rendering and real-time dynamics.”

Equipped with over 2 gigabytes of RAM and an NVIDIA QuadFX graphics card, Smoky Hill’s HP
workstations run powerful design software, render quickly and shorten project timelines. Smoky Hill has paired each workstation with an HP 20-inch Flat Panel Monitor, which offers user-comfort features such as antiglare coating and flicker-free screens. “The students
love the size and capability of the monitors,” Cornell notes. “The color and resolution are excellent.”

Philip Niemi, a senior at Smoky Hill, works on most of his digital media projects using AutoDesk Maya, one of the design world’s most powerful tools. Both Cornell and Niemi note that the school’s previous computers were unable to efficiently run Maya.

“Just a dramatic leap forward,” comments Niemi, when comparing the previous computers to the new HP workstations. “Maya eats up a lot of memory and system processes, but the HP workstations are awesome. They can run drawings with huge poly counts. No problems, no slowdowns. That wasn’t even remotely possible with the old system.

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