Creative Bloq has posted an article discussing how the cloud is changing the way studios plan, render, and budget the projects they work on. You can read the full article on the Creative Bloq website.
How the cloud is revolutionizing VFX
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“Just imagine: five guys in their garage with access to the same scale of resources currently reserved for the largest VFX facilities in the world…”
In other words…
Just imagine: five dudes with unlimited amount of money who never heard of a renderfarm a webservers or a vpn sitting in their garage.In theory haveing the same ressources as a large VFX studio.Well yes those guys for sure have nothing better to do than making VFX 😉
Well, imagine a further where you have to bid for your jobs along with cheap labor from the third world.
You really have to offer something special if you are not going to loose the contract to guys who work at a third/quarter of your salary.
On the positive side, I can go freelance with same computation power as large studios,, if I get the contract, that is.
The image looks familiar 🙂
well it depends, for simple task(rendering) it helps to have more power but when you make simulations it’s getting not easy. the sim has to be done on the cloud because a small studio doesn’t has always a 1 gbit upload internet connection. if you want to get a big contract you have to deliver it and the render files aren’t small.
This article doesn’t even cover the other aspects of using a cloud base render system. Software is a major factor along with all the p lugins you are using. This article makes it sound like magic and it’s not.
Don’t forget about all that cool simulation work. Terabytes of data that you just can’t upload and repath to render those sims.
There is still bandwidth issues up and down. Now you have a 5 person team working from hom trying to do a big job and their ISP goes down and they are just a little customer with no business contract so they’ll get service back in the order it went down. So the infrastructure is still a factor.
Still not ready for anyone under the sun working from home to just jump on the cloud and make it work.
Agreed there’s a lot of IT work involved to get everything to work together. Render farms are better option I think for now. The virtual machines on amazon are not as powerful as the physical ones you can buy the last time i checked.
@Matt Totally agree, they make it sound like the entire world is on Google Fiber! Cloud rendering is great in theory, not so great when you’re dealing with literally hundreds of shots a day where even a LAN based render farm is struggling to keep up.
Article aside, some studios have successfully used cloud rendering to cut down costs. As for “competing” with people living in poorer countries, that’s a pretty big discussion that requires so many factors to be taken into account. Either way, in some cases it’s useful and in others it’s not. Like with anything, it’s rarely black and white — neither always useful nor always useless.
Regardig those terra bytes of data: I have successfully simulated straight in the cloud. No transfer needed. You kinda remote desktop into a vSphere with virtual windows machines. Sim right there, everyhing in one place. You fire up virtual nodes as you need them and only pay or the up hours. That was before VRay e.g. Needed sim licenses though. For TP, FumeFX, XMesh you nee a single license only and install the readers/unlicensed slave version on the vMachines. Works for me…