Category: AWS Thinkbox

Scaling storage globally Building out a multi-site studio has traditionally been a challenging task for companies and productions. Driven by the need to win additional projects, hire world-renowned talent, or capture location-specific incentives, companies inevitably confront the realities of large-capital expenditures, forecasting for maximum size, and onboarding a large quantity of local IT staff. As […]

Over the past few years, Visual Effects (VFX) studios have gone more global by opening satellite studios or hiring artists working from home all around the world. Whether the reasons are location specific financial incentives, unlocking local talent, or co-locating with a production team, having a render farm in a single location is no longer […]

This blog post was co-authored by Michael Muir, Senior Product Specialist at Epic Games. Figure 01: Epic Games’ Unreal Engine provides real-time content generation, manipulation and rendering. Introduction Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has revolutionized the creation and manipulation of real-time 3D content. With technology advances such as Lumen and Nanite in Unreal Engine 5, leaps […]

AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10.3, a new version of the batch compute render scheduler, is now available. This version introduces support for Epic Games’ real-time 3D content creation tool, Unreal Engine, and includes version updates for many other industry standard digital content creation (DCC) applications. Compatible across Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms, Deadline 10.3 supports over […]

When he founded Outpost VFX in 2012, CEO Duncan McWilliam never thought that his studio’s on-premises computing infrastructure would max out the building’s electrical system—or that he would be asking the landlord for more power. Outpost VFX creates visual effects for films and episodic television. Some of its recent credits include the Amazon Prime series, […]

As the prevalence and complexity of computer-generated images (CGI) has increased in film, TV, and commercials over the years, so has the industry’s demand for massive compute for render farms to process and render CGI elements. Render farms massively reduce render times by dividing large renders into smaller tasks and distributing those tasks among a […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced AWS Thinkbox Deadline release 10.2.1 that includes the addition of AWS multi-regional support to the Spot Event Plugin, which allows Deadline customers to easily scale rendering by launching and managing Spot Fleets in multiple AWS regions from a single Spot Event Plugin. Introduction In order to leverage the elasticity […]

Figure 1: Autodesk VRED provides high-end rendering and streaming of complex digital assets The VRED set of software tools from Autodesk let designers create and present high-quality product renderings of complex digital assets, such as automotive vehicles and other engineering-related artefacts. VRED has traditionally used an array of hardware to increase productivity, including multiple GPU […]

Today Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10.2.0.10 support for Rez. “Rez is an open source, cross-platform package manager that creates standalone configured environments for third-party and proprietary digital content creation software. Rather than installing packages directly into environments like most other package managers, Rez installs all package versions into repositories on disk […]

Today Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces that AWS Thinkbox plugins for Autodesk Maya (Krakatoa MY and XMesh MY), and for Autodesk 3ds Max (Krakatoa MX, XMesh MX, Frost MX, and Stoke MX) are now available under the Apache 2.0 open source license. You can access the source code from GitHub for KrakatoaMY, XMeshMY, KrakatoaMX XMeshMX, […]