rendering
Render Farms
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Optimizing hardware and accelerating the rendering time of scenes & images for the artist allows a faster turnaround of changes required during production. And this is not limited to post-production houses, broadcasters or the motion picture community.
“There are 3D creative pros (in architecture firms, for example) who struggle to explain their needs to enterprise IT professionals who just don’t get it, says Schwartz at BOXX. “IT often controls the budget, but they have no concept of what ‘render nodes’ are, yet insist on their ‘server solutions’ that don’t cut or are overwhelmed with redundancy, security, firewalls, etc.”
Keeping track of and auditing render farms is no easy task. Saving time and saving money equals an increase in productivity and, therefore, an increase of profits. “And queue management software is not as easy to use as designers might like it to be,” continues Schwartz.
“Managing render farms is a significant challenge,” says Dr. Tim Moreton, Founder & Chief Product Officer at Acunu — The ‘Big Data’ specialists. “The operations teams require a deep understanding of the creative process as well as the technology that powers the rendering. Accurately predicting demand for the render farm and keeping a high throughput of render jobs is essential for meeting production deadlines as well as IT budgets. Alongside everything else they do, studios increasingly need to be sophisticated technology organizations to succeed.”
“Acunu works with studios to help provide real time insights that join the dots between what work the render farm is doing and how the actual infrastructure is running,” Dr. Moreton furthers.
Andrew Price, a 3D animation artist at Blender Guru (www.blenderguru.com), sums-up the rendering process and describes why a render project sucks:
1. There’s no point It doesn’t tell a story, it’s not advertising anything and it’s certainly not pretty. What exactly is the viewer getting from this? Nothing makes me close the window faster than a piece of art with no clear objective.
2. You use pre-made content Stock models are great for studios who want to save time and money by purchasing a pre-made model. But it has absolutely no place in your portfolio. Personally I find no pride in showing someone a render that I haven’t created entirely by myself, but that’s just me. If you don’t know how to model it, why not learn?
3. You’re copying something far more successful I love Wall-E as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I try to mimic what a professional studio has slaved over for years on end. Why? Because unless it’s an uncanny comparison (which it won’t be) viewers will only spot its flaws.
4. You didn’t plan it on paper first It’s easy to tell when an artist failed to put their idea on paper first: it’s a confusing mess. They started with an idea, skipped the planning stage and jumped straight to their 3d program. Most artists cannot model/texture/render in 3d at the same speed as their imagination. The best thing you can do is put it on paper as soon as the idea strikes you, that way you have a reference in 2 weeks time when you’re sitting at your computer and asking, “what was I making again?”
5. It’s cliche If I see another cave troll or big breasted warrior, I’m going to puke. Be original and create something that everyone hasn’t already seen a thousand times. (continued on Next Page)
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014