
Ask HN: How is it to work in Visual Effects industry as a developer? - aprdm
Anyone has experience on it? Lots of automation, scalability of the nodes, render farms... Looks like very interesting work.
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KaiserPro
Depends on where you are, what you want to do.

There are two main bits of VFX developer work: tools and RnD.

Tools developers are there to allow artists to find, convert, import and send
assets to a render queue. Most of this is written in python, as thats the
embedded language of choice for most VFX packages (maya, nuke, $other)

Then there is RnD: this is most of the stuff you see at sigraph. We need to
implement a new type of water caustic that doesn't suck, Model snow more
realistically, or trying to make hair systems not an utter pain in the arse to
use.

If you want to be in the tools department you'll need python, and some
experience with maya/nuke/renderman/arnold.

If you want to be doing RnD you'll need to figure out what you want to play
with and either apply to a company that trying to build their own renderer
(MPC) or join a company that is already building one (disney, pixar, the
foundry, autodesk)

Also, beware that its an industry thats in the second part of a massive
globalisation heave. Jobs are clustered in vancouver & london. However there
are large changes that mean lots of work is starting to gravitate to china and
india. At the moment its low end stuff like paint and roto, but thats where
the next generation comes from.

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KaiserPro
I also forgot to mention; at a well established shop everything is automated &
integrated.

most workstations will have a network home partition, which means that your
home directory is everwhere you log in. Its easier and miles faster to write
something out to an NFS share than it is to use HTTP/database

Ten gig switches get saturated without trying too hard (Place I worked pulled
a constant 15 gigabytes a second from storage. bursting to 35. thats bytes,
not bits)

Render farms have been using cgroups for many years. you'll start to worry
about scheduling rate of tasks.

The only things that are virtualised are things like the intranet and the
wiki. everything else is on real steel

rendernodes are big, there are loads of them, but never enough. They are
treated like cattle.

There are large data pipes. however if you deal with marvel, you'll not have
internet access at your desk, it'll be through some horrid remote desktop
system. If you're lucky you might get one way copy and paste.

Fluid sims have caches that are in the order of 10s of terabytes

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jkrp
Curious about Marvel, any more info? I find it interesting, am wondering how
difficult a rd would be and such.

~~~
KaiserPro
So Marvel are wonderfully paranoid about footage leaks.

It didn't help that someone got drunk on a plane and left wolverine on an
unencrypted laptop. (which wasn't a VFX person because it had sound, titles
and non VFX shots)

They specify that there must be an air gap between "work side" and the
internet.

This means that there must be two/three networks, A workstation network which
has no internet, a Data IO network for sending and receiving assets from other
companies and finally the remote desktop server for internet access.

Other things like USB disks are disabled on all non dataIO workstations.

I've heard that some places were being forced to disallow email access as
well. However I think that was successfully argued against.

The hardest part is not having access to download libraries.

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malux85
I have some experience here..

I worked at a studio in London, I was basically a data wrangler, writing
python tools to automate everything.

The render farm consisted of 250 nodes, each had 48 cores and 256GB of RAM. It
was connected to a large storage array, total storage was approx 5PB.

In the evenings the desktop machines that the modellers worked on were turned
into render nodes. These machines were given lighter scenes to render since we
wanted them to complete overnight.

The longest frame I have seen has taken a 48 core node 60 hours to render a
single frame.

What else would you like to know?

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ivraatiems
In what format does a rendered image come out? How large is it? How is editing
done?

~~~
malux85
I worked in VFX - so we were delivered the edited scenes and the artists would
render on top of them ... theres very little post-processing done, what comes
off the farm is fit for the client.

Although the farm schedules individual frames, they are combined into scenes
(short clips from 2 - 30 seconds) and the artists get the scenes back. The
scene file format is proprietary (and viewed with proprietary software), but I
had a sneaky look inside and it seems to be losslessly compressed TGA frames.
Scenes are usually short 2-6 seconds, and filesize would be 2-3 GB

