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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#301

Post by rperez333 »

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…

I work as a compositor on a visual effects studio that had to adapt, and can say that I'm impressed too!

The studio internally uses PCOIP boxes, which I don't like due the added tiny delay (I'm a bit like those developers who complain about miliseconds of latency on their text editors...). Anyways, for the work for home setup, we are using NoMachine, which doesn't feel any different from the PCoIP boxes - unless if using the MacOS client, which is much laggier than the Windows or Linux versions.

Actually, I went ahead and tried installing Nomachine on Google Cloud and Amazon AWS CPU only instances, and got the same responsiveness of my studio setup. No fancy setups or gpu encoding/decoding.

So if you have a Nuke license, you can do some pretty heavy 2D vfx for about 1USD/hour on a 96vcpu machine (performance similar to an AMD 32core) and 196GB of RAM, even without any GPU acceleration.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#302

Post by CyberDildonics »

forelle2 wrote: post #299
CyberDildonics wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texture caching in modern renders tends to be on demand and paged so it is very unlikely the full texture set is ever pulled from the filers. This was easier to rely on in the days before ray tracing, when texture filtering was consistent because everything was from the camera. Ray differentials from incoherent rays aren't quite as forgiving. > If you don’t know how an asset is to be used it makes sense to texture…

Mari was designed in production at Weta, based off the lessons learned from, well, everything that Weta does. Take for example, a large hero asset like King Kong. Kong look development started many months before a script was locked down. Kong is 60ft tall, our leading lady is 5’2”. We think we need shots where she’ll be standing in Kong’s hands, feet, be lifted up to his face, nose etc. So we need fingers prints that…

500 separate 4k textures patches for a character covered in fur is excessively wasteful. Things like 3 4k subsurface maps on 500 patches maps on a black skinned creature that is mostly covered by fur is grossly unnecessary no matter who tells you it's needed.

We both know that stuff isn't showing up on film and that the excess becomes a CYA case of the emperor's new clothes where no one wants to be the one to say it's ridiculous.

> When working the artist uses 6 paint layers for each channel ( 6 is a massive underestimate for most interesting texture work).

This is intermediary and not what is being talked about.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#303

Post by banana_giraffe »

rperez333 wrote: post #301
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…

I work as a compositor on a visual effects studio that had to adapt, and can say that I'm impressed too! The studio internally uses PCOIP boxes, which I don't like due the added tiny delay (I'm a bit like those developers who complain about miliseconds of latency on their text editors...). Anyways, for the work for home setup, we are using NoMachine, which doesn't feel any different from the PCoIP boxes - unless if u…

I've tried a few remote desktop systems. The last one I tried was Parsec, which works well, but always made me feel queasy since it requires you to trust their connection service. (To be clear, I know of no security issues there, I just don't like relying on a third party for my security)

NoMachine looks like a good answer for people like me. Thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#304

Post by aprdm »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #302
forelle2 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mari was designed in production at Weta, based off the lessons learned from, well, everything that Weta does. Take for example, a large hero asset like King Kong. Kong look development started many months before a script was locked down. Kong is 60ft tall, our leading lady is 5’2”. We think we need shots where she’ll be standing in Kong’s hands, feet, be lifted up to his face, nose etc. So we need fingers prints that…

500 separate 4k textures patches for a character covered in fur is excessively wasteful. Things like 3 4k subsurface maps on 500 patches maps on a black skinned creature that is mostly covered by fur is grossly unnecessary no matter who tells you it's needed. We both know that stuff isn't showing up on film and that the excess becomes a CYA case of the emperor's new clothes where no one wants to be the one to say it'…

Your opinion on something doesn’t mean much when confronted with real world experiences from the biggest studios.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#306

Post by kevinhaefeli »

Very interesting discussion here. I'm founder of a cloud startup and would love to hear your view on our solution:

We're currently building an API for rendering with the major render engines like V-Ray, Corona etc. Therefore we automatically scale jobs and deliver the results to our customers favorite storage like a NAS / s3 bucket or a google drive.

Another factor is, that we can reduce the costs for the cloud rendering factor 2-3x compared to the public clouds by tapping into spare capacity of secure data centers around the world (connected to our platform).

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#307

Post by franzb »

berkut wrote: post #61
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? 24 hours per frame?! At the standard 24fps it takes you 24 days per film second which works out to 473 years for the average 2 hour long film which can't be right.

In high-end VFX, 12-36 hours (wall clock) per frame is a roughly accurate time frame for a final 2k frame at final quality. 36 is at the high end of things, and the histogram is more skewed towards the lower end than > 30 hours, but it's relatively common. Frames can be parallelised, so multiple frames in a shot/sequence are rendered at once, on different machines.

Hi Berkut, I'd love to get in touch with you, unfortunately I couldn't find any contact info in your profile. You can find my email in my profile. Cheers!

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#308

Post by CyberDildonics »

aprdm wrote: post #304
CyberDildonics wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

500 separate 4k textures patches for a character covered in fur is excessively wasteful. Things like 3 4k subsurface maps on 500 patches maps on a black skinned creature that is mostly covered by fur is grossly unnecessary no matter who tells you it's needed. We both know that stuff isn't showing up on film and that the excess becomes a CYA case of the emperor's new clothes where no one wants to be the one to say it'…

Your opinion on something doesn’t mean much when confronted with real world experiences from the biggest studios.

Maybe some day I'll know what I'm talking about. Which part specifically do think is wrong?

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#309

Post by throwaway888abc »

KaiserPro wrote: post #156
throwaway888abc wrote: post #102

Is there similar scheduler to K8S ?

https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/TRA/Tractor+2 much more simple, scales way higher, has much better documentation. However its not designed to do the same thing. tractor is about cramming as much stuff onto a machine as possible as fast as possible. It also is designed to handle processes that fail. it doesn't force you to use stupid network patterns, and has very rich dependency management. But its not decentralis…

Awesome !!!!! Thank you so much

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#310

Post by aprdm »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #308
aprdm wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your opinion on something doesn’t mean much when confronted with real world experiences from the biggest studios.

Maybe some day I'll know what I'm talking about. Which part specifically do think is wrong?

Focusing on the technical steps and what might be technically feasible or not versus the existing world and artists workflows. Also speaking as an authority that knows best patronizing who actually works in the industry.
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