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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#191

Post by naikrovek »

turminal wrote: post #108
naikrovek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You all are perfect delicate flowers that need things to be just right in order to use them, then? Is that what you're saying? Because that's what I'm getting from you.

I for one am saying Twitter has many, many people working on UX and the web interface is still terrible. Hardly any interface made for such a broad spectrum of people gets it just right for all its users, but Twitter is doing an exceptionally bad job at it.

I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically.

Yes, their UI sucks. No, they haven't fixed it. I would not be surprised at all if that were due to necessity rather than incompetence. Even tiny changes at that scale make large differences.

And, honestly I would not be surprised if it were incompetence, either. The skill of the silicon valley developer (as demonstrated by the commenters here) does not impress me even a little.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#192

Post by __turbobrew__ »

lattalayta wrote: post #124
banana_giraffe wrote: post #95

One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance. I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code…

That is correct. It's pretty common for a technical artist to have a 24-32 core machine, with 128 GB of RAM, and a modern GPU. Not to mention that the entirety of the movie is stored on a NFS and can approach many hundreds of terabytes. When you're talking about that amount of power and data, it makes more sense to connect into the on-site datacenter.

I’m guessing Pixar is using a distributed file system opposed to traditional NFS? Do you have any idea what storage system render farms tend to use?

At my workplace we have a smallish HPC center and ended up moving off of NFS at about 2PB of storage since we were starting to hit the limits of NFS (think 1TB of RAM and 88 cores on a single NFS server).

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#193

Post by aprdm »

KaiserPro wrote: post #172
aprdm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, did you move outside VFX and if yes to what industry, have you been enjoying and what motivated you? Cheers

I spent tenish years in VFX. I moved away in 2014, because the hours and pay were abysmal. I still love the industry. I moved to a large profitable financial news paper, which had cute scaling issues (ie they were all solved, so engineers tried to find new and interesting ways to unsolved them ) I then moved to a startup that made self building machine readable maps, which allowed me to play with scale again, but on…

Interesting, thanks for sharing! I've been in VFX around ~6 years and was in the sw industry before (and the hw industry before it).

I find VFX really fun as far as job! Sometimes I do think about leaving mostly for Pay reasons but the pay has been decent enough recently (basically FAANG base pay without RSU/Bonus...).

It is interesting how we have a lot of big scale problems that goes unrecognized, I find the problems really challenging. Compared to when I worked in the software industry we had a team 10x as big for a problem 100x simpler.

Outside of some big tech companies, biology, oil industry and finance, I cannot imagine many companies having such a big scale on number of cores/memory/disk.

Working in Pipeline I haven't found crazy hours yet, has been mostly a 8h/day job that I can disconnect after I am done. Also with Covid some people even switched to 4 days weeks which is quite interesting.

Anyho, thanks for sharing your perspective!

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#194

Post by kylegordon »

I have many fond memories of my first real job as sysadmin/render wrangler for a small animation company about fifteen years ago.

Cores and memory were indeed what mattered, and as long as frames could be fitted into memory then the machine was left to render the frame and then save it back out to shared disk. There was no virtualization, just raw compute hardware running at full capacity 24/7. The scene was already split into different layers and rendered as sequences of frames that were then composited into final products.

First job, first mini-datacenter in a new building, and there I am asking contractors to knock a hole in the building to fit air handlers due to the heat we were expecting to generate. Was great fun.

It taught me a lot about automated systems management.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#195

Post by berkut »

KaiserPro wrote: post #173
berkut wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumour in the industry is that Pixar don't use Tractor themselves, and have a custom solution in Emeryville :)

Lol, that doesn't surprise me at all. Pixar were the last of the original companies to custom make everything....

I think it's more that Tractor's not really very highly thought of in the industry :)

It works, and roughly does what it says on the tin, but most of the bigger studios (other than MPC and DNeg who do use it) have better custom solutions.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#196

Post by mroche »

dgrant wrote: post #175
mroche wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire studio is VDI based (except for the Mac stations, unsure about Windows), utilizing the Teradici PCoIP protocol, 10Zig zero-clients, and (at the time, not sure if they've started testing the graphical agent), Teradici host cards for the workstations. I was an intern in Pixar systems for 2019 (at Blue Sky now), and we're also using a mix of PCoIP and NoMachine for home users. We finally figured out a quirk w…

Hi. I used to work at Teradici. It was always interesting that Pixar went with VDI because it meant the CPUs that were being used as desktops during the day could be used for rendering at night. Roughly speaking. The economics made a lot of sense. A guy from Pixar came to Teradici and gave a talk all about it. Amazing stuff. Interesting contrast with other companies that switched to VDI where it made very little sens…

Yep, all of their workstations were dual socket servers, where each socket was a workstation VM with PCIe passthrough, and each getting their own hostcard+GPU. Each VM had dedicated memory, but no ownership of the cores they were pinned to, so overnight if the 'workstations' were idle, another VM (also with dedicated memory) would spin up (the other VMs would be backgrounded) and consume the available cores and add itself to the render farm. An artist could then log in and suspend the job to get their performance back (I believe this was one of the reasons behind the checkpointing feature in RenderMan).

The Teradici stuff was great, and from an admin perspective having everything located in the DC made maintenance SO much better. Switching over to VDI is a long term goal for us at Blue Sky as well, but it'll take a lot more time and planning.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#197

Post by Consultant32452 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #19
hadrien01 wrote: post #10

For those that can't stand Twitter's UI: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345146328058269696.html

Thank you. All I saw was a post with zero context, followed by a reply, followed by another reply using a different reply delineator (a horizontal break instead of a vertical line??), followed by nothing. It just ends. It's hard to believe this is real and intended.

Twitter, and social media in general, is not intended to give you space for nuance. Long conversations are discouraged. Hot takes are encouraged. They want to smash you with things that trigger an emotional response over and over. In my personal business I don't care all that much what you 'want,' I care what you'll pay for. Twitter doesn't care what you want, they care what drives engagement/ad sales.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#198

Post by NickNameNick »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #144
dagmx wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in production rendering for films, there's a great deep dive into all the major studio renderers https://dl.acm.org/toc/tog/2018/37/3 As for your questions: > Is rendering of video games more similar to rendering for movies, or VFX? This question is possibly based on an incorrect assumption that feature (animated) films are rendered differently than VFX. They're identical in terms of most tech st…

> This question is possibly based on an incorrect assumption that feature (animated) films are rendered differently than VFX. They're identical in terms of most tech stacks including rendering and the process is largely similar overall. Showcased by the yearly highlights reel that the Renderman team puts out. https://vimeo.com/388365999

For a 2020 showreal, there sure were a lot of 2019 and earlier movies in there.

I'm pretty sure one of those shots was from Alien:Covenant (2017)

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#199

Post by dahart »

klodolph wrote: post #188
capableweb wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like you can just slice the frame into rectangles and farm them out. Funny thing, you sure can! Distributed rendering of single frames been a thing for a long time already.

What about GI? You can't just slice GI into pieces.

Why are you thinking GI wouldn’t work? Slicing the image plane pretty much works for parallelizing GI just as well as it does for raster. It does help to use small-ish tiles, that way you get some degree of automatic load balancing.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#200

Post by jgwil2 »

naikrovek wrote: post #189
mkl wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" That doesn't work. Neither "read more" nor "show more replies" appears on the page [1]. Nor does "show replies", which turns out to be what you actually need to click once you go to a place it appears. In fact, there's no indication that there even are more replies, or that "replies" are actually the main content. To see the content…

> It is not usable in any real sense. Absolutely untrue. I can use it. Again, (for about the 4th time) I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's usable. I want everyone who is disagreeing with me to spend a SINGLE EFFING DAY with a para- or quadrapalegic and then tell me that TWITTER is unusable. What I'm trying to say is that "you have no idea what unusable really means." You people are spoiled rotten and you not on…

So because there are people in wheelchairs nobody can complain about a suboptimal user experience on a popular website with hundreds of engineers making copious amounts of money?
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