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I have some experience here.. I worked at a studio in London, I was basically a data wrangler, writing python tools to automate everything. The render farm co

by malux85 11y ago

I have some experience here.. I worked at a studio in London, I was basically a data wrangler, writing python tools to automate everything. The render farm consisted of 250 nodes, each had 48 cores and 256GB of RAM. It was connected to a large storage array, total storage was approx 5PB. In the evenings the desktop machines that the modellers worked on were turned into render nodes. These machines were given lighter scenes to render since we wanted them to complete overnight. The longest frame I have seen has taken a 48 core node 60 hours to render a single frame. What else would you like to know?

iamcreasy 11y ago
How do they make sure that they don't have to redo the frame again?
- malux85 11y ago
  The scheduling software (Qube) is responsible for retrying failed jobs. A frame render can fail for many reasons (e.g. Incorrectly packaged assets, missing textures, out of memory, bad lighting info, missing plugins, random SIGHUPs - rarer) - so if something screws up then Qube will retry N times if it can find available hardware. From the artists point of view, they don't render a frame once, they continuously render and progressively increase the level of detail until they're happy with the scene .. this means the render farm is almost always busy.
ivraatiems 11y ago
In what format does a rendered image come out? How large is it? How is editing done?
- malux85 11y ago
  I worked in VFX - so we were delivered the edited scenes and the artists would render on top of them ... theres very little post-processing done, what comes off the farm is fit for the client. Although the farm schedules individual frames, they are combined into scenes (short clips from 2 - 30 seconds) and the artists get the scenes back. The scene file format is proprietary (and viewed with proprietary software), but I had a sneaky look inside and it seems to be losslessly compressed TGA frames. Scenes are usually short 2-6 seconds, and filesize would be 2-3 GB
aprdm 11y ago
That looks very interesting, did you leave the industry (as you said in the past) and if so, why? Do you think that someone having experience with backend / web development with Python would do well in this kind of job? Thanks
aprdm 11y ago
Also another question, to do exactly the task you've done, where did you learn about it? Any specific courses or books? Thanks

by malux85 11y ago

iamcreasy 11y ago

How do they make sure that they don't have to redo the frame again?

malux85 11y ago
The scheduling software (Qube) is responsible for retrying failed jobs. A frame render can fail for many reasons (e.g. Incorrectly packaged assets, missing textures, out of memory, bad lighting info, missing plugins, random SIGHUPs - rarer) - so if something screws up then Qube will retry N times if it can find available hardware. From the artists point of view, they don't render a frame once, they continuously render and progressively increase the level of detail until they're happy with the scene .. this means the render farm is almost always busy.

ivraatiems 11y ago

In what format does a rendered image come out? How large is it? How is editing done?

malux85 11y ago
I worked in VFX - so we were delivered the edited scenes and the artists would render on top of them ... theres very little post-processing done, what comes off the farm is fit for the client. Although the farm schedules individual frames, they are combined into scenes (short clips from 2 - 30 seconds) and the artists get the scenes back. The scene file format is proprietary (and viewed with proprietary software), but I had a sneaky look inside and it seems to be losslessly compressed TGA frames. Scenes are usually short 2-6 seconds, and filesize would be 2-3 GB

aprdm 11y ago

That looks very interesting, did you leave the industry (as you said in the past) and if so, why? Do you think that someone having experience with backend / web development with Python would do well in this kind of job? Thanks

aprdm 11y ago

Also another question, to do exactly the task you've done, where did you learn about it? Any specific courses or books? Thanks