Last week, I was invited to participate in a VES panel discussion about "Virtual Render Farms", followed by a kick-ass BBQ, all in the old ILM facility on Kerner Blvd in San Rafael. While I'm sure the free food and beer had something to do with the turnout, there was a good-sized audience for the panel discussion itself.
Steve Mays, from X2 Technologies, lead off the discussion with a very in-depth analysis of the various technologies involved - including Teradici thin clients that could (ultimately) allow 2D and 3D artists to work remotely - and I mean, internationally-remotely, with all of the data stored within the datacenter. (That's a topic for another post: what would the fully-integrated remote production datacenter look like? But I digress...)
Alex Ethier (shown below, with his dog, who also attended) gave a succinct analysis of the "production" perspective - which was generally that this would be a Good Thing all round.
But what does it mean, this idea of a "virtual" render farm? Well, there are several layers to that question - at the simplest level, running multiple OSes, each in a separate Virtual Machine (VM) allows studios to combine multiple functions on a single (multi-core) server, in isolated memory spaces. It's also possible to run VMs as an alternative to multi-booting a machine when different applications (e.g. Adobe After Effects, which runs on Mac and Windows, but not Linux) need to be distributed on the render farm. Yes, there's an overhead associated with that, but that overhead gets smaller each day - and with I/O virtualization, each subsequent bottleneck gets to be less and less of an issue. There are other benefits, as well - imagine multi-core, multi-head servers in a data center, with artists using thin clients on the desktops. Even if those artists are in the same facility as the data center, the cost-per-artist drops, along with up-front CapEx expenditures. With sufficient bandwidth available, some of those artists (or most, or all) could be working from home - or remote locations, wherever they happened to live. The next logical step is to have a central data center that could support multiple studios - further reducing the CapEx budgets (and thus, barriers to entry) for smaller teams of artists and programmers to expand to accomodate larger productions.Now, there are any number of technical obstacles that still need to be overcome for this to become a reality - and some of that includes the pricing on some of these technologies. But as frequent readers of this blog will have already guessed, my focus - and the theme I touched on during the panel discussion - is on the social engineering aspects...
The biggest obstacle is this: almost none of the software packages used in Digital Media (e.g. Maya, Mental Ray, Renderman, etc.) have licensing agreements that permit this kind of use. I'm not talking about metered software - where a central facility (or the publisher itself) would rent time on a license, either. I'm talking about a corporate entity that owns licenses to that software, but can't run them on machines that are more than [n] miles from the address noted on the license (typically 5 miles or so). "Rendering on the cloud" is not the point - without legitimate software licenses for the rendering applications - and a pipeline/workflow that can support the data transmission costs/issues, it's not a real solution.
Speaking as the head of a software company, I understand the problem, here. All of our business models are built on licensing software to end-users; not metering it. But at PipelineFX, we've already embraced daily rentals of our software - and this has turned out to be extremely popular. I think this is, to some degree, an inevitable aspect of the software business - it will not be without some pain, as publishers struggle to create a business model that works for both sides, and the adoption of this model in general is dependent on the availability/affordability of the technology discussed earlier. But I also think it will open up new business models on the content-creation side of things - which can only be a good thing for artists and TDs and producers, as well as software publishers.
