The customizable and scalable cloud-based system boasts built-in customization tools and popular DCC integrations, offering accelerated production timelines without capacity limitations and no upfront costs.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of AWS Deadline Cloud, a fully managed service that helps customers set up, deploy, and scale rendering projects in minutes. With the new service, customers creating computer graphics, visual effects (VFX), or innovating their pipelines to incorporate artificial intelligence-generated (AI-generated) visuals, can build a cloud-based render farm—aggregated compute—that scales from zero to thousands of compute instances for peak demand, without needing to manage their own infrastructure. The service features built-in customization tools and integrations with digital content creation (DCC) software, such as Autodesk Arnold, Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, and SideFX Houdini, to tailor render pipelines for specific projects and directly render from preferred tools for use in design, modeling, animation, visual effects, and others. In addition, creative teams can accelerate production timelines by running projects in parallel, without capacity limitations.
Deadline Cloud’s built-in budget-management capabilities help customers understand costs with high granularity on a project-by-project basis. The service has no upfront costs and customers only pay when they are rendering. Learn more here.
Deadline Cloud helps customers in industries such as media and entertainment, architecture, and engineering to transform content-rendering pipelines for projects spanning films, television shows, commercials, games, and industrial design, without upfront investments or ongoing costs between projects. With the AWS Management Console, users follow a guided process to build their renderfarm, including providing the size and duration of their projects to determine instance type and configuring permissions. Deadline Cloud automatically provisions Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and manages the network and compute infrastructure, simplifying customers’ ability to scale compute based on demand.
“We are at a tipping point in the industry where demand for rendering quality VFX and the amount of content created using generative AI are outpacing customers’ on-premises render farm capacity,” said Antony Passemard, general manager of Creative Tools at AWS. “AWS Deadline Cloud meets any customer’s rendering requirements by providing a scalable render farm without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Creative teams can embrace the velocity of content pipelines and respond quickly to opportunities to accept more projects, while meeting tight deadlines and delivering high-quality content.”
For customers already invested in on-premises compute infrastructure, Deadline Cloud can integrate with and extend the existing compute to execute rendering jobs. For example, an animation studio can combine DCC and generative AI techniques to render compute-intensive scenes with Deadline Cloud at scale for an upcoming film, without concern about impacting other projects or provisioning additional infrastructure. Deadline Cloud’s dashboard provides a comprehensive view to analyze logs, preview in-progress render jobs, and review and control costs. In addition, third-party software licenses can be linked with the service, or can easily engage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing DCC tools and render engines. The scalability and flexibility of Deadline Cloud, through its pay-as-you-go model, eliminates costs required setting up an on-premises render farm.
Deadline Cloud is generally available now in U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland).
Media company Animaj’s VP of Engineering Antoine Lhermitte commented, “Our business is rooted in automating and optimizing the production of 3D animated scenes that spark kids’ imaginations worldwide. Running our unique pipeline — which combines several steps of complex character animation manipulations — is tedious and time-consuming when done on custom infrastructure, creating content bottlenecks, and detracting from time that we could spend innovating on storytelling. With AWS Deadline Cloud, we can scale render capacity up or down based on dynamic workloads and adjust capacity in minutes rather than hours. By offloading undifferentiated work, we have been able to deploy seven times faster, giving us the ability to expedite our artists’ inventions so they can focus on creativity and bringing inspiring stories to global audiences.”
Company 3 is a comprehensive post-production facility for features, episodic, commercials, and music videos; its director of New Technology, Phil Wortas, shared, “Over the years, we have invested in on-premises resources for handling our large rendering jobs. The flexibility of AWS Deadline Cloud for managing render computing, both on-premises and in the cloud, and the ability to use Open Job Description to allow us to build the integrations we need freely, helped us easily share job execution processes across multiple departments in our company.”
3D animation and visual effects tools designers Side FX’s technical consulting manager Rob Stauffer said, “As the creators of Houdini, industry-leading virtual effects software, it is vitally important to us that the artist experience when using our tools is intuitive, customizable, and future-proofed. The integration of Houdini with AWS Deadline Cloud means artists can use advanced and familiar tools for motion graphics, virtual reality, and more, before seamlessly rendering in the cloud directly from Houdini, allowing creators to stay focused on innovating new ways to deliver breathtaking content rather than managing rendering workstreams. We look forward to exploring new opportunities to augment the richness of Houdini’s comprehensive toolset with the performance and capabilities of Deadline Cloud.”
Source: AWS
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
