What is a rendering engine?

With the rapid development of 3D movies in recent years, VFX movies have also received more and more attention. From the point of view of the box office of European movies, the top 5 movies Avengers: Endgame, Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Infinity War. They are almost inseparable from VFX production. And Disney relied on the 3D animated film Frozen series, sweeping $ 2.574 billion in the world, creating a new record for the global animated film box office. image via internet Why do you need to use a render farm? Rendering is indispensable behind these movies, and rendering is almost done by various render farms of all sizes. Rendering is the later part of 3D animation production, and rendering is a very time-consuming step in the later stage. An 80-minute animated movie can often be rendered in thousands to tens of thousands of hours. In the animated film COCO, 29,000 lights were used in the scene of the train station; 18,000 lights were in the cemetery; 2000 RenderMan practical lights were used in the Undead World. The production team used the RenderMan API to create 700 special point cloud lights, which expanded to 8.2 million lights. These massive lights are a nightmare for the rendering artist. For the production requirements, the test can not complete such a huge rendering. They once tested rendering and found that these light-filled shots actually took 1,000 hours per frame! They continued their research and shortened it to 125 hours and 75 hours. The rendering time of one frame at the time of final production was 50 hours and one frame. The movie is 24 frames per second, 1440 frames per minute, if a movie is calculated as 90 minutes. That 1440 frames * 90 minutes = 129600 frames, 129600 * 50 = 6480000 hours. Converted into adulthood is 740 years? image via internet "To render Avatar, Weta Digital used a 10,000-square-foot server farm. There are 4,000 servers with a total of 35,000 processor cores. The average time to render a single frame is 2 hours, 160 minutes of video. The overall rendering time takes 2880000 hours, which is equivalent to 328 years of work for one server! " image via internet If the rendering work is only on a general computer, this is almost impossible. So the production team created its own render farm, powerful machine performance and huge number to complete such a huge amount of work. For small teams, studio, freelancer, and individual producers, rendering take the same time. If they want to spend a lot of time using the computer for rendering work, this is undoubtedly a time-consuming thing, and they are unacceptable. These various reasons, coupled with uncontrollable factors such as computer crashes, special effects artists often cannot complete the work within the time specified by the producer due to rendering problems. Moreover, the labor, material, and electricity required to maintain computer rendering. The cost is also a big fee for the production company! So it is very necessary to work with some render farms. Not only can it save the time of the production staff, but also can use a large number of machines in a limited time to complete the work in a short time. The emergence of cloud rendering technology makes the render farm more mature. Cloud rendering is to upload materials to the cloud and use this cloud computing system of the rendering company to render remotely. Another advantage of cloud rendering is that small studios can also be responsible for rendering high-quality materials. In the film industry, this technological change is no less than the change that cloud computing itself brings to the IT industry. Taking Fox Renderfarm as an example, no matter where the special effects technician is, they can use cloud rendering services to complete the "trilogy": 1. Upload your project; 2. Wait for the rendering to complete; 3. Download to the local machine. In addition, they can call more machines according to their urgency, and they can arrange the order of rendering and monitor the progress of rendering at any time. At the same time, the price is relatively low, which is accepted by many film and television special effects companies, rendering studios, and individual designers. So, why not have a free trial on Fox Renderfarm now? to experience the amazing cloud rendering services to speed up your rendering.

In recent years, Disney has been keen to remake classic animations and has released live-action versions of Maleficent, Beauty and the Beast. They have achieved amazing consistency between the 3D picture and the original animated picture. It can be said that the 2D animation lens is perfectly restored. Reference picture from Beauty and the Beast There is only one magic weapon to do this - Special Effects! In a VFX movie, these gorgeous effects are 24 pictures per second, even a short 10-second special effect. For the artist who produces the special effect, that is 240 pictures, and sometimes for production needs, And divides a screen into multiple layers. To meet the needs of rendering, most VFX studios choose to rent a commercial render farm for rendering. Of course, there are also a few companies that build their own render farm. But now the CG industry has appeared a technology called cloud rendering, also known as rendering in the cloud. Cloud rendering is to upload materials to the cloud, and remotely use the hardware of those companies that have cloud computing systems to render. This means that no matter where the artist is, he can use cloud rendering to complete the work quickly and easily. It's easy to use, the price is reasonable, and you can perform rendering operations no matter what time and place, without spending time to maintain. 1. Registration To use a cloud rendering service, you need to register with the platform first. Like Fox Renderfarm, there is $25 free credits for every new registration. 2. Project Upload Log in and upload your project with the platform. 3. Rendering The system will automatically analyze and render your project. 4. Project Download Download the rendered frames with a few simple clicks. And, according to the urgency, you can arrange the order of rendering and monitor the progress of rendering anytime, anywhere. In addition, cloud rendering computing technology can also divide one or more rendering tasks into several parts, which are simultaneously rendered by each node in the cluster, thereby reducing the overall rendering time and shortening the movie production process. For example, if A wants to render a 60-second special effect, 24 pictures in 1 second, the cloud rendering can automatically distribute these 1,440 pictures to 24 machines, and each machine renders 60 pictures. In this way, the rendering time becomes 1/24, and the producer no longer has to worry about rendering issues! The pricing method of cloud rendering is likened to a "home electric meter", and only charges when it is used The development of cloud rendering is the general trend. Due to the special nature of film production, special effects studios do not always have something to do, but as soon as they receive production needs, they need to focus and render a large number of materials. If you build your own render farm, you also have to bear the burden of intermittent idle hardware, and cloud rendering is the best solution. Mr. Hublot won the 86th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film with rendering support by Foxrenderfarm in 2014 Another advantage of cloud rendering is that it lowers the threshold for special effects production. It allows small studios to also afford high-quality material rendering, which undoubtedly brings new changes to the CG industry. For example, Mr. Hublot, which won the 86th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2014, was produced by an animation team using Foxrenderfarm's cloud rendering technology. This allows many teams to see more hope and the opportunity to bring more high-quality work. Three Robots of Love, Death, and Robots，which also rendered by Fox Renderfarm Fox Renderfarm is a leading cloud render farm service in the industry. Since the foundation in 2009, Fox Renderfarm has earned a good reputation for its quality performance, great customer service and flexible pricing scheme.

What is the importance of video rendering, GPU or CPU? Video rendering is different from CG rendering in that they are completely different rendering methods. Video rendering, in general terms, is to combine the various models, effects, or animations that were made in the early stage in the post-production software. In these processes, complex effects and effects are inevitably involved. It is difficult to achieve real-time display with the current computer computing power, so after editing the graphic image, the final effect we need is output by adjusting and modifying, that is, video rendering. Video rendering requirements for graphics cards and CPU. For professional design work, 3D modeling / video rendering, general CPU multi-core and multi-thread parallel processing is very important, and requires a faster and larger cache of the CPU to temporarily store a large amount of computing data, this time CPU computing power requirements are very high. Therefore, the general professional work computer, the CPU requirements are relatively high, the general advanced architecture, multi-core, large cache high-end CPU can better meet the demand. In video rendering, the graphics card is more of an acceleration, 3D effects will rely on graphics cards. Take Adobe Premiere video editing software as an example. This professional software relies more on CPU multi-threading performance. The more cores and threads, the faster the video processing speed will be. In some video size compression and format conversion, transfer a certain amount of GPU graphics card resources, but the mobility is limited, ordinary low-end GPU graphics cards can meet the demand. Of course, it is not that professional graphics, GPU graphics are not important, general 3D modeling is more dependent on GPU graphics than CPU. In general, the modeling of 3D software depends on the CPU. Regarding the professional design, it depends on the CPU or GPU. The main focus is on the scene and the software. Generally, the CPU is mainly clipped, the GPU is accelerated, and the 3D special effects production depends on the GPU. CPUs and GPUs are important for professionally designed computers. In the rendering of video compression, the higher the GPU, the lower the GPU occupancy rate. At present, it is like Adobe Premiere video editing software, mainly based on CPU work, GPU is supplemented by such a state, and as long as Low-end GPU graphics can be very demanding.