vfx rendering on aws
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VFX Rendering on AWS
©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
VFX Content Creation: a complex pipelineVFX Content Creation
• 3D software– Painting, compositing, modeling, lighting/shading, …
– 3dsMax, Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Blender, …
• Production management– Shotgun, …
• Standalone or plugin-based rendering software– Renderman, Arnold, V-Ray, Mental Ray, Octane, Maxwell, Mantra, Corona, …
• Render farm management (jobs, queues, resources)– Deadline, Backburner, Tractor, Team Render, …
• Storage– Distributed and clustered block storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),
Amazon Glacier, …
Building a Render Farm on AWS
• Easier than you think– Automated deployments: AWS CloudFormation, scripts & CM tools
– Scale in and out as needed
• Backed by shared storage in the cloud
• Create a cluster of any size on-demand quickly
• Pay only for what you use
Key components for AWS-based VFX rendering
• Powerful compute options with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)– GPU and CPU-based render farms
• Flexible pricing models– Spot, On Demand and Reserved
• Amazon S3: infinitely scalable object storage
• Amazon Glacier: affordable long-term archive
• Wide array of automation tools
• Large partner ecosystem
AWS-based rendering pipelines of the future
• Leverage container computing with Amazon
Elastic Container Service
• Event-driven computing with AWS Lambda– Auto-trigger renders and other jobs as new assets arrive
• Creative applications streamed
VFX Rendering on AWS: DIY
Disposable Storage Disposable Render farm On Demand Terminate
Amazon S3
Compositing
Scalable Shared Storage
on Amazon EC2
hydrated on-demand
from Amazon S3
AWS CloudFormation templates
define on-demand render farm
Add capacity affordably
with EC2 Spot Instances
Delete all the resources
attached to the Render Farm by
calling delete stack at the end of
the render queueEffectsRendering
License server
Render Farm
management
VFX Content Creation: renderingVFX Content Creation
• 3D software– Painting, compositing, modeling, lighting/shading, …
– 3dsMax, Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Blender, …
• Production management– Shotgun, …
• Standalone or plugin-based rendering software– Renderman, Arnold, V-Ray, Mental Ray, Octane, Maxwell, Mantra, Corona, …
• Render farm management (jobs, queues, resources)– Deadline, Backburner, Tractor, Team Render, …
• Storage– Distributed and clustered block storage, S3, Glacier, …Pixar License Manager …
• 3D software– Painting, compositing, modeling, lighting/shading, …
– 3dsMax, Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Blender, …
• Production management– Shotgun, …
• Autodesk Mental Ray– Renderman, Arnold, V-Ray, Mental Ray, Octane, Maxwell, Mantra, Corona, …
• Thinkbox Deadline– Deadline, Backburner, Tractor, Team Render, …
• Storage– Distributed and clustered block storage, S3, Glacier, …
VFX Rendering on AWS: Mental Ray & Deadline
Autodesk Mental Ray
• 3D rendering software
• Available standalone or as a plugin– Maya, Softimage, 3dsMax
• CPU-based rendering– Perfect fit for the Amazon EC2 c3 and c4 instance families
– g2 instance families if running in client that requires GPU
• FlexNET license server
Thinkbox Deadline
• Share your render farm between applications and departments
• Coordinate render jobs, simulations, distributed commands, recurring tasks, daily software builds, application installations, and more
• “Intelligent slaves” look for work and make decisions based on your job settings
• Over 60 applications supported out of the box– More can be added via Python and native application scripts
Amazon EC2
Thinkbox Deadline: Hybrid rendering with AWS
• Combine on-premises and AWS compute resources into
one logical pipeline
Remote Office
VPN
Local Office
Database &
Repository
VPN
AWS
Thinkbox Deadline on AWS
• Reduce costs: start/stop Amazon EC2 instances as required
• Balance across AWS Availability Zones and Regions for
redundancy and capacity
AWS
us-west-2 Region
VM instance
VM instance
VM instance
VM instance
AWS
us-east-1 Region
VM instance
VM instance
VM instance
VM instance
©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.