

Why Pixar uses Microsoft's Azure - roadnottaken
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/226427.asp

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ajg1977
Pixar doesn't use Azure. Pixar demonstrated a proof of concept that involved
using Azure instances as virtual processors for a cloud-based Renderman farm
that MIGHT be attractive for CG shops that can't afford, or don't need, a
fulltime render farm. Maybe there's a shop somewhere that would be useful for,
but it's certainly not going to be a Pixar or an ILM.

The biggest issue with a cloud farm like this is going to be bandwidth. For
cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's
not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes. And you tweak
and render, and tweak and render. Often the size of the data is such that when
there is a need to collaborate with a different FX shop the files are sent
over Sneakernet - HDD via courier or overnight FedEx.

If I was to guess, I would say this is basically virtualization technology
developed for in-house use (which is very useful) that has been turned into a
cloud demo for Azure. Why I don't know, but Pixar won't be switching to Azure
anytime soon (or ever).

~~~
Tamerlin
"For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge -
it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes."

I recall reading an article, IIRC in CineFX, about the Godzilla model in
Gozilla 2000 (the Devlin and Emmerich film). The textures for their Godzilla
model alone were something like 900 MB.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Pixar introduced a renderfarm hosted in
Azure.

Although the amount of data is very large, you don't general end up taking the
bandwidth hit all at once. If you have your renderfarm set up on Azure, you
could set up a plugin for your animation software, e.g. Maya, that uploads the
assets for the scene you're working on and renders it on an Azure virtual
machine configured with multiple processors, then download the rendered image
data. One you upload the assets once, you will rarely if ever have to upload
the whole lot of them again if the render management software is smart enough
to keep track of which files you've modified since the last time you rendered.
So you've modified a mesh but none of its textures, it only needs to upload
the mesh in order to re-render.

It's hardly trivial, and for the larger shops like WETA Digital that are
creating massive, virtual sets with massive, virtual armies modeled and
rendered with Massive (couldn't resist :)), they can afford an in-house
renderfarm -- and the costs will favor it.

For a smaller shop, that might not be so easy, BUT there are shops that are
pulling off some pretty amazing animations without buying the pricey
software... outfitting a renderfarm with Photorealistic RenderMan or Mental
Ray or Final Render licenses can get quite expensive -- when last I checked,
it was something like $2000 or $2500 per machine for a Mental Ray rendernode
license. PhotoRealistic RenderMan was in the same price range.

~~~
eccp
WETA Digital uses Ubuntu Server on their server farm and desktops:

[http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/ubuntu-
linux-...](http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/ubuntu-linux-used-
making-avatar)

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pedrocr
Does anyone know who actually deploys Windows based cloud/Internet-facing
systems? All the big corporate IT shops I've consulted for only used Windows
servers to support Windows clients and that kind of stuff doesn't move to the
cloud well. All the big Internet companies (Google, Facebook, etc) deploy on
Linux as far as I've seen. Most startups I've heard about deploy on Linux
VPS/Heroku/AppEngine type infrastructures. I also though most of the 3D
rendering was being done on Linux but maybe that is not the case.

The only example I've seen of windows deployment was dpreview.com, and the
comments I read from them were in the line of "it's not as bad as everyone
says it is and we're familiar with the stack so we use it".

Is windows a large percentage of EC2 for example? I tried to google for that
but couldn't find anything.

~~~
bkhl
This might help: <http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/>

~~~
pedrocr
Thanks for that. A lot of them seem to be one-off projects. I'm still trying
to find how much of EC2 runs windows but can't seem to locate that figure.

~~~
bkhl
I'm not sure if Amazon would disclose that number. It can be a sensitive
number for a company to make business strategy.

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macrael
Doesn't seem like they are actually using Azure for their films. The article
says this was a proof of concept.

~~~
brown9-2
Oddly, this correction doesn't appear until the middle of the article:

 _Clarification: The RenderMan/Azure demo shown was a proof of concept._

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DannoHung
Huh... was sort of hoping that the article would answer the question that it
asked... "it'll be around for a while" isn't a great answer considering
Microsoft's history with some of it's service platforms.

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larrywright
The headline is very misleading, they aren't using it at all. It was a proof
of concept only.

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S_A_P
They also mention that Pixar was co founded by Steve jobs instead of purchased
from George Lucas.

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jonhendry
Pixar using Azure to render movies would be like Microsoft building Azure on
top of Amazon EC2. Pixar and Microsoft probably _could_ do these things, and
arguments could be made for the economic advantages, but they'd be giving up
opportunities for competitive advantages, and letting outsiders get them by
the short and curlies in the context of crucial aspects of their businesses.

I _could_ see Pixar working with Microsoft to make Azure-hosted Renderman
available for other groups doing rendered projects. For a small film project,
I'd think that could be really useful.

Then again, Photorealistic Renderman was in NeXTSTEP 3.0, and you could split
a rendering job among local NeXT machines as easily as choosing render hosts
from a GUI list. That didn't mean Pixar was rendering their Listerine
commercials on 25Mhz 68040 boxes.

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rflrob
Anyone have a sense of who the market is for cloud-based 3D rendering? It
seems like even for a small-to-medium-sized shop it's likely to be worthwhile
to have a pretty solid baseline capacity in house...

~~~
candeira
I would think it's the opposite: for a small-to-medium shop it makes all kinds
of sense to concentrate on your core (design, animation, client development)
and just rent "rendering as a service".

a) If you have a small headcount, a dedicated server wrangler's salary would
be better used to pay for a person with a more product-oriented profile.
That's what makes the difference between you and your competition: you aren't
writing your own renderers anyway.

b) When maintaining your own serverfarm it can be difficult for you to have
the jobs pipeline full at all times, and you can either have a lot of spare
capacity sitting around between jobs, or need more horsepower during peaks.

c) This also allows small-to-medium shops to tackle problems bigger than they
could otherwise from a pure cashflow point of view. If you are renting
rendering-as-a-service, your clients are paying for the hardware their jobs
need, no need to invest, amortize, etc. Just pay an invoice coming in and an
cash an invoice going out.

It seems to me that these are exactly the kind of problems SaaS is designed to
solve, and that small-to-medium shops can benefit from this solution more than
big studios who can:

a) amortize their server wranglers over bigger installations, so their
sysadmin/creative ratio is lower.

b) keep the rendering farm working efficiently, or even rent it out if they
have lulls in work.

c) afford big financial investments.

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wtracy
Green Button is a startup already doing this: <http://www.greenbutton.net/>

They even use Azure. They don't specifically support Renderman, though. (At
least, not yet.)

Like other posters here, I would be curious to know why these companies are
using Azure instead of some other cloud platform.

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mindcreek
Nothing in the article says anything about Pixar using Azure other than a
proof of concept and gives no answer to the leading question.

Pixar is founded by George Lucas then bought and nurtured by Steve Jobs though
:)

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wazoox
There was a similar system (on demand render farm "in the cloud") on WAM!Net
in... 1999? the more it changes, the more it's the same :)

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drylight
If a job posting to work at a Pixar server farm is anything to go by, they
actually use Linux for their films.

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thinkbohemian
This article does not address the technical reasons why Pixar chose to
demonstrate this proof of concept using Azure.

Mad props to roadnottaken though for this other gem:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744214>

