Nominee

Faster FX with HPC

Crest Animation Studios has undertaken the development and implementation of RenderMax with the help of High Performance Clusters to speed up rendering

"Crest was the first studio in India to run render farm on an open source platform using the Sun Grid engine" - P Krishna Prasad Head, IT, Crest Animation Studios

Crest Animation Studios has been designing graphics and animation for the domestic and international markets for more than a decade. However in recent years, it made a complete shift to computer graphics (CG) animation for the international market. With increasing orders, the company started expanding as and when it needed more graphics workstations and servers.

Crest has implemented RenderMax, a job submission and management tool for 3D rendering using an Autodesk Maya / Softimage XSI running on Linux platform. It took almost one year for this task to complete and acquire stability. The project was started in February 2004 and completed in February 2005.

Rendering for interactive media such as games and simulation is calculated and displayed in real-time, at rates of approximately 20 to 120 frames per second. Animation for non-interactive media such as video and film is rendered much more slowly. Non-real-time rendering enables the leveraging of limited processing power in order to obtain higher image quality.

The rendering time for individual frames may vary from few seconds to an hour or more for complex scenes. Rendered frames are stored on a hard disk and then possibly transferred to other media such as motion picture film or optical disc. These frames are then displayed sequentially at high frame rates, typically 24, 25 or 30 frames per second to achieve the illusion of movement.

Key products and technologies used

Rendering through RenderMax Crest’s render farm SAN Hardware: IBM, Intel and AMD Operating System: Fedora / Suse Linux Middleware (job scheduler): SGE 5.3 & SGE 6 (Sun Grid Engine) 3D applications: Autodesk Maya 7, Autodesk Maya 8, Softimage XSI 5, Apple Shake 3.5

Earlier to this implementation, they were using stand-alone workstations for render process. Since it is a processor- and memory-intensive process, it uses almost all the system resources, which prevents the users to work when the render process is going on. This problem pushed them to find a solution to make use of the valuable resources efficiently and save time.

Speed in studio

P Krishna Prasad, Head, IT, Crest Animation Studios says, “With increasing orders and approaching deadlines, we needed to render more scenes a day. We had multiple high-end servers to render scenes, but still the rendering was slow. For instance, sometimes a few complex scenes used to take a number of hours or even a couple of days. Further, if the scene had some corrections to be made, the whole process needed to be done all over again.”

Hence the company purchased a network-distributed rendering software to automate a lot of processes as far as distributed rendering was concerned. But as compared to individual local rendering this software was slow. After a lot of effort and research the company found out that High Performance Clusters (HPC) was the only solution which was used by different types of industries to achieve the respective targets. It was found that a couple of studios in the world are using HPC to achieve the same. Unfortunately all the available designs are proprietary designs, no body has disclosed its internal functions which can be mapped and recreated.

“Unfortunately the HPC we first created failed so badly that it was dead slow, actually worst than what we had seen as network rendering. But finally we were successful to achieve this power of rendering called RenderMax. We have gone a lot more ahead in the design with workflow and automation on the same,” adds Prasad.

Crest’s Render farm is a stack of high-end servers working in the HPC mode. Set of servers are grouped to form a cluster, the group size is determined based on the project requirement. Each form has a master node for job scheduling and a storage node of storing the output and files required for rendering. The user copies the files to the storage node from central SAN storage and fires the job using the RenderMax job submission Web interface. This interface also facilitates status of running jobs, re-scheduling, cancelling job and reporting.

“Crest was the first studio in India to try Render farm on an open source platform using SunGrid engine. Lack of documentation and guidance might have delayed the project, but our expertise in open source and 3D animation helped us to get rid of the problems we faced initially,” says Prasad.

As for the future, Crest is in the process of improving the application’s functionality to eliminate the few manual interventions involved in the existing system by having a powerful central storage that provides high input / output throughput. Also this will have the automated job scheduler and will be integrated with the proprietary project management system ‘RushHour.’