rendering
Render farms
30
BY Ryan Salazar
PIXAR Talks Render Farms with Ryan Salazar
Rendering is a Drag… But It Doesn’t Have To Be… The Experts at Pixar Shine a Light My Way!
When you hear the word “farm,” you either think of “Old MacDonald” or a bunch of cows or fields of wheat, etc. “Render farms” evoke the same type of vision — albeit one of many computers linked together with yards and yards of cabling, rather than animals grouped together in a barnyard. But the concept is similar. Many servers joined together for one purpose: to render — or to take an artist’s product and transform it into a complex animation for viewing.
It isn’t because you can’t render on single machines — it is definitely possible. However, when you consider that rendering bits or parts of an animation can take into the millions of hours to render, the “one machine” possibility is no longer an option.
Teaming clusters of systems together to generate frames of videos is an amazing time-saver, especially when there are heavy scenes that need lots of processing power. A great example of what a render farm can do compared to one desktop machine: our company creates a decent amount of animation via Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema4D. I created a render farm with 20 nodes (BOXX Technologies server blades) along with a render controller (another server).
Contemplate this: a 192 frame national TV commercial job that we rendered (about 6 seconds of animation) took 4.5 hours (or about 1.5 minutes per frame) on the animator’s computer (a MAC Dual-Hexa core or 12-cores, with 24G RAM). That same project rendered on our farm in 8 minutes (or about 2.5 seconds per frame)! Yes… the time saved is clear — considering 30fps with a standard 22min TV show is 39,600 frames, at 1.5 min/frame = 990 hours (or over a month running 24 hrs/day) versus 2.5 sec/frame = 27.5 hours.
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014