In the last decade or so, the Animation, VFX (Visual Effects) and gaming
arena have seen some rapid progress. Each of these technologies has moved out of
the computing laboratories to become a full-fledged industry in itself. This
progress has also brought with it some new challenges.
Along with the regular management challenges that most organizations face,
these studios have dealt with challenges like Pipelining, Render Management and
Digital Asset Management.
The production process in a studio is usually very serial and iterative in
nature. Due to this, the work flow is referred to as the 'Pipeline' by the
industry. The problem is that, even though Animation, VFX and Gaming have a
common base in 'Computer Graphics', yet each of these industries follow
different production practices. Not just that, unlike other industries, each
project itself may require a different workflow. To complicate things further,
due to the highly artistic nature of the work, the skill set required may also
vary from task to task and not just from project to project. An improper
workflow could derail the project at it crucial stages.
Rendering is the process of creating images of a movie scene and is a highly
compute intensive task. These individual images are sequenced together to form a
movie. One second of a movie scene is made up of 25 very high resolution frames,
while one second of television scene is made of 50—60 normal resolution frames.
Depending on the complexity of the scene, rendering a single frame may take up
to hours.
But fortunately this is a process that can be easily parallelized. If we have
enough resources, each frame can be rendered by different computers. For
example, if one has 100 Computers, 4 seconds or 100 frames of the scene can be
rendered in the same time that it takes to render one frame. Such an array of
computers used for rendering is called a 'Render Farm'. Managing a Render Farm
is a challenge, as one has to deal with multiple jobs (scenes) and multiple
frames being rendered simultaneously.
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Q What Q What according to you is |
A huge number of images, scene files, movie clips etc. are generated and used
during a project. Due to intellectual / artistic value attached to it, these are
known as Digital Assets. Storing these assets securely as well ensuring that
they can be retrieved easily when required is another challenge that most
studios face.
This is the problem space that DUX Soft tries to address using SPARX, a
software application that provides end to end production support for studios of
all types and sizes. SPARX aims to automate the complete production life cycle
of Digital Content creation, right from requirement capture to final delivery
and archival. SPARX will help studios dynamically change their production
practices without having to undergo a major Change Management process with every
project. And to enhance the speed of the rendering at the backend of SPARX a
mammoth 100 Core Render farm is sitting.
The Implementation
Right from the start, SPARX has been developed keeping in mind 'ease of use'
for the end user. Therefore the whole system has been designed like a file
system explorer. A graphics artist intuitively knows what to do as soon as he /
she logs in. Over and above this, a context sensitive help screen guides the
user on every step. SPARX web interface has been developed on PHP 5.2.x and uses
various additional plug-in to enhance its features. The web pages have been
written in plain HTML, with very little JavaScripting and AJAX support. It has
been tested to work with most new browsers like IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari.
SPARX uses Sun Grid Engine 6.1 in the background for its job scheduling and
management activities. The excellent features that Sun Grid Engine provides
allows one to prioritize job queues, pause jobs, manage compute loads, offload
an activity from one compute node to another, have detailed accounting of the
jobs completed, etc. SPARX can be integrated with Microsoft ADS or any other
LDAP service to provide a common authentication and single sign-on to any SPARX
module. At the backend SPARX uses four Dell PowerEdge 2550 servers for ADS,
Storage and SPARX Master Node. For the render farm they have used 25 Dell
PowerEdge 1950 for Render Farm with two dual core processors which essentially
mean 100 cores. The nodes runs OpenSuse 10.3 as the operating system which is
stripped down to an extent that they have minimal OS overhead on the processors.
And as this render farm is connected to the website from where the customers can
initiate process at any time, they needed to keep all these servers running
throughout. But to save power what they have done is that, they have created a
script which turns on all the 25 nodes when any job is initiated. And once the
job is finished all the nodes again goes to shutdown state automatically. This
simple trick helps them to cut down power consumption in a big way.
The Impact
This kind of a outsource workflow management for rendering will essentially
help the small and medium companies which are into this space. Now they can
concentrate on the core job of creating the animation footage instead of wasting
a huge amount of CPU and Human time in rendering the created footage without
even investing a bomb on deploying their own render farm.