rendering
render farms
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“Blinn’s law which states that no matter how much computing resource is available, the overall rendering time of a frame will always remain constant, has proved remarkably resilient to date, says Chris Ford, RenderMan Business Director, Pixar Animation Studios, in a discussion I had with him. “Though CPU capacity continues to grow rapidly, and new infrastructure such as the cloud and GPU’s may increase throughput and economy, it is equally true that ongoing developments in cinematic image rendering such as ray-traced global illumination combined with the always increasing artistic demands of the Director will continue to demand whatever resources are available.”
We have a FlipFactory-Array running renders for over 10,000 files that are processed monthly. This cluster of systems is a render farm which processes .MOV files and creates .M4V, .FLV and .mpg media.As we all know, a render doesn’t mean your job is complete. It just means you’re ready to pop it into the timeline, make some more magic and send to your producer or client for approval. If they have a revision… then you have ANOTHER render to do. One of our artists has a poster on his wall, exclaiming: “Rendering Sucks!” Anyway, the farm speeds everything up thus allowing faster approvals and in the end, getting the final job quicker, too.
“The importance of the artist’s time and what that is worth in regard to one’s creative business; dedicated rendering allows you to off-load your designs saving valuable time,” explains John Vondrak, Copy Writer/Video Producer at BOXX Technologies. “For many artists (especially indie operators), the limitations of space, sufficient electrical power, and finances makes a product like renderPRO an ideal choice; an artist can build a very formidable render farm using renderPRO modules.”
“BOXX responds to popular demand for a personal render option (the Render PRO) for freelancers and entrepreneurs that don’t have server closets,” says Gerrie Schwartz, Performance Specialist at BOXX Technologies.
Motion Picture and Post Production Facilities (even broadcast!) use render farms on a daily basis. In my current situation, our post facility has several render farms:
Our animation render farm uses hardware from BOXX Technologies called, “renderBOXX Pro.” That hardware has PipelineFX’s Qube running. Qube is a great render manager which runs all of our 80 nodes (960 cores!). The animation work we create is generated from Maxon’s Cinema4D and Autodesk’s Maya.
Although Cinema4D doesn’t seem as high-end as Maya, professionals routinely use it because it feels easier and less intimidating. Maxon produces a product called “NetRender” which is their own rendering engine — one computer running the NetRender server suite can then access other computers running the NetRender Client application — cross platform — over the network, making the other computers render nodes within minutes! Naturally, Autodesk has a similar set-up for its Maya software called “Mental Ray.” Utilizing parallel network rendering, mental ray for Maya is placed on all the master machines and mental ray standalone is placed on the subservient or “slave” machines, creating a fully-networked rendering environment capable of some powerful workloads (Continued on Next Page).
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014