Rendering on the Cloud: The Journey from the old school Render-farms to Cloud Based Render Systems
Each frame of a Disney-Pixar film takes around 24 hours to be rendered. In fact, Pixar Animation Studios recently rendered it’s superhero-flick, Big Hero 6, on a supercomputer with 55k cores.
“We have said it many, many times. We made the movie on a beta renderer”
- Andy Hendrickson, CTO at Disney Animation
The renderer Andy referred to was Hyperion, an in-house rendering software by Pixar which could simulate real-world lightning. The lightning tricks and using the real world data of the city of San Francisco costed them enormous render time and hence they had to resort to using the supercomputer cluster which was distributed across four geographic locations.
Thankfully, indie animators and small studios won’t have to do that or wait for years if they want to render their films and VFX shots.
Enter: Cloud Computing!
Weta Digital, the VFX studio that has 6 Academy Awards for Visual Effects and has worked on blockbusters like Avatar, Avengers: Endgame and Alita: Battle Angel, has recently shifted to an AWS Cloud Render Farm for the production of Avatar 2. It is known to be the largest single-site VFX Studio in the world, based in Wellington, New Zealand.
For the recent Spider-man film, the VFX work was outsourced to Luma Pictures and they chose Google Cloud for rendering. The probable reason for using GCP might be due to the introduction of Elementals (Earth, Water & Fire Monsters) and the notorious anti-hero known as Mysterio, who is known for his spectacular sparkling effects. The physics, fabric and fluid-particle simulations required for the portrayal of above mentioned characters could be extremely time consuming. With the usage of Google Cloud Platform, the rendering time was reduced to approximately 1/5th of the local render-farm time. This helped them deliver the movie to the audience at the right time!
How do VFX Studios render on the AWS Cloud?
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is made with the required Amazon EC2 G3 instances and SSDs. G3 instances provides access to the powerful NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs. The VPC is connected to the on-premises workstation using AWS Direct Connect.
AWS Direct Connect is a physical ethernet fiber-optics cable that connects the workplace network to the virtual private cloud. One of it’s ends is connected to your internal network router, while the other one is connected to the AWS Direct Connect router at their data center.
The VFX artists can work on their high-end workstations (either Windows or Linux) consisting of 2k displays, drawing tablets, keyboard, mouse and most importantly: a Teradici PCoIP Client.
PCoIP stands for PC over IP which is a RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) developed by Teradici. These PCoIP clients help in remotely controlling the computers on the private cloud (more precisely: instances). The client can also detect input from drawing tablets, which can sense up to 8k different levels of pressure.
Fun fact: Luma Pictures (mentioned above) now plans to install a direct connection to Google Cloud (Region: Los Angeles), which is similar to AWS Direct Connect. This will result in higher bandwidth and lower latencies, which would be beneficial for their future productions.
How can Indie Filmmakers & Studios Render on the Cloud?
For smaller studios or independent animators using an open-source CGI Suite like Blender, the process might be even easier and faster. Here are a few methods for rendering on cloud using Blender:
- Let’s begin with a quick-fix: use the GPU provided by Google Colab! Of course this may sound inefficient and silly at first but it’s good if you are aiming for a simple and a short animated clip lasting for a few seconds. You can directly render your ‘.blend’ file with this python script: BlenderRender.ipynb — Colaboratory (google.com)
- Another method involves the use of AWS and is extremely efficient, especially for longer animated clips or physics intensive ones. Simply choose a P or G type Amazon EC2 Instance running a recent Linux AMI, and install Blender along with the necessary NVIDIA Drivers. Setup the script required to enable GPU rendering (Credits: Fajrul Falah). Similar steps can be followed for Google Cloud Platform.
- The third option is a paid alternative and requires monthly subscription (starting from 50$ USD) provided by RenderStreet. It is sold as a SaaS (Software as a Service) on the AWS Marketplace: Monthly rendering subscription for 3D projects (Blender / Modo) (amazon.com)
Conclusion: With features like scalability and on-demand hardware, Cloud Computing is a boon for the VFX & Animation Industry, both: large-scale and indie. It has drastically reduced render time, market costs and best part: independent filmmakers don’t have to worry about the ‘thermal hell’ their devices have to endure while rendering!
