PipelineFX Qube! Accelerates Original Force’s Animation Renders

Chinese 3D animation coutsourcing company Original Force recently chose to use a render farm
management firm, PipelineFX, to organize and optimize their render pipeline.

With over 700 full-time employees, multiple sites throughout China and a client base that includes Dreamworks, EA, Microsoft and THQ, Original Force has been growing as an animation outsourcing company. This growth and high level of expectation from these clients has made an efficient and flexible production pipeline, including render management, a greater priority.
For some years, Original Force’s render management software was either very simple or available free. It worked, but not very well. As the complexity of their projects began to grow, the studio found that their software often couldn’t handle their workload. They were also using a variety of different applications and systems at the same time. Programs such as 3ds Max, Maya, V-Ray, mental ray and RealFlow were all a part of their pipeline, and needed to be compatible with whatever render method they decided on. They considered Qube!, designed and supported by PipelineFX, because it has been in use for some time and has a number of major clients in different locations.
Another problem Original Force faced this year was how to efficiently manage the size of their render farm, consisting of more than 400 HP blades and over 3,000 cores. These CPUs needed to support different teams with different needs during production. Qube! was developed specifically for digital media creation, built on a client-server architecture and runs on Windows, OSX and Linux. It generates, prioritizes, dispatches and oversees render and build jobs. Qube! is a multi-threaded Supervisor designed to manage many jobs simultaneously. This type of architecture is always available, low maintenance and stable. The ability to add more threads to the Supervisor, which can improve performance, makes Qube! scalable. The architecture is also event-driven and responds immediately to job submission and dispatches to workers. The event-model supports the attachment of arbitrary callbacks via the Qube! API for customization. Events can then trigger other events or external interactions with applications. Specific application pipelines include Maya, Softimage, 3ds Max and Nuke. Each pipeline contains a submission form for the Qube! GUI, a command line submission tool, a submission GUI integrated into the application itself, and a backend execution module. Shotgun Version Submission automatically creates and updates Shot/Asset versions when submitting a render job through Qube!. The most recent version of Qube! 6.3, also has in-application submission for Cinema 4D. www.pipelinefx.com    www.originalforce.com