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Pixar's Render Farm

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382 points brundolf | 1 comments | 02 Jan 21 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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banana_giraffe ◴[02 Jan 21 21:38 UTC] No.25616781[source]▶
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's remote mode. I can't imagine trying to use a modern GUI over these connections.

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rperez333 ◴[04 Jan 21 05:01 UTC] No.25628067[source]▶
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.

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1. banana_giraffe ◴[04 Jan 21 05:41 UTC] No.25628228[source]▶
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.