rendering
render farms
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BY RUSH BEESLEY
Onward and Outward:
Broadcasting’s Transition to All-Digital Workflow
The simple truth is that it’s human nature to resist and even avoid fundamental change.
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Render managers distribute workload amongst many machines. The render controller (usually referred to as the “root controller,” manages projects that are submitted to it via, for example, PiplineFX’s Qube product. Qube is an industry-leading render manager utilized by the motion picture & broadcast industries and also government organizations.
Qube (and many other render management systems) handle split-frame rendering — it can divide a single frame into multiple pieces, giving each piece to different computers, rendering them, then stitching the pieces back together into a final rendered frame for “distributed rendering” in order to speed things up.
There is also another world of rendering — In the cloud… Huh? I have always had my reservations about rendering online. However, there are services like CloudFuzion and RebusFarm. Mike Duffy of CloudFuzion, also the manufacturer of EnFuzion, explains that an insatiable appetite for the “need for speed” and everyone wanting results quicker means that the “render cloud” is becoming a solution. Render farms with hundreds of render nodes can be built and on-line to the Studio within minutes. Add the auto expansion capability, bridging internal resources with external clouds delivering on-demand pay as you go 100% scalable computing all driven and managed by CloudFuzion® makes this an ideal solution for all areas of 3D community.
“Today, artists in 3D Studios in Hollywood CA can cost studios $1500 to $2500 a day, depending upon skill level and experience,” says Duffy. “Creative Directors must assure these expensive resources are kept creating art forms for 3D animation movies, commercials and special effects and are not waiting around for their images to finish rendering on their local machines. This is where render farms come really into play.”
“The Creative Director can be assured artists are creating and not waiting around for image processing,” Duffy furthers.
Animation Studios ALL use rendering, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Digital Domain, Disney and Pixar.
Pixar’s RenderMan Studio is an advanced rendering solution that used to be proprietary but was so powerful that everyone wanted the shading & lighting and deep textures shown in such films as “Toy Story,” “Cars” and “Monsters, Inc.” Similar superior visual effects are available in Pixar’s RenderMan Studio, allowing any Maya artist to create VFX with Pixar’s technology. As explained on the website: “The toolset of Pixar’s RenderMan is broad and deep. It’s one system that can deliver many types of effects which can be integrated in a variety of ways, but it is also customizable and flexible to accommodate any production pipeline.”
“Contemporary feature film visual effects and animation render farms often now exceed 10,000 cores to meet the visual quality expectations of today’s audiences,” says Chris Ford. “For Pixar’s RenderMan, we have developed highly scalable network render distribution tools such as Tractor to complement our latest rendering algorithms such as easy to setup physically plausible shading techniques that deliver images of the highest complexity and realism, and the results are evident in the majority of visual effect movies you see today.”
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014