Renderfarm Made for a Monkey

In the movie and TV industry, technology continues to grow at a faster rate every year. It seems it's now at a point where equipment gets outdated before you have it plugged in. At Monkeyhead, an award-winning motion design house in Los Angeles, we're constantly challenged by keeping everything up to date. With tight deadlines always looming over us, it's imperative that we give ourselves as much of an edge as we can. There's tons of competition in our industry, and we have to be able to not only compete creatively but also technologically.

When we first were getting underway, every artist working on one Apple Mac Pro system seemed fine. But motion design seems to be leaning more heavily on 3D these days, which in turn means long render times. Now, stack that up with 1080p multilayer renders to give us compositing freedom, and we have projects that can render for days or even weeks if we're not careful.

Sure, we can try to reduce the complexity and render settings down to save us time, but sometimes that's not nearly enough. The more realistic or dense the scene, the more trouble the renders become. This brings us to our latest project, Pushing Boundaries, that in turn gave us the push we needed to grow.

Pushing Boundaries is a new action sports TV show that we were approached to build. This was a full graphic package, including an open, lower thirds, bumpers, and transitions. Whenever we build out a TV show graphic package, the goal is to build it out as simple as possible to use all the elements. No matter how complicated the look, we want an editor to easily be able to assemble the episode in his edit bay with as little or no help at all from others until the final audio mix and online.

As with most things in TV, the job was awarded to us and shortly after, the deadline was looming overhead. So, once we promptly came up with a concept to fit the show and find unique ways to frame the footage for the open, we jumped into storyboards. After designing the look and knowing that we had a tight deadline, we knew we needed to either simplify the look or get more render power.

Before this point, we simply linked our systems up through a gigabit connection to render together on Maxon Net Render for Cinema 4D. All of our systems currently are newer 8-core Mac Pros loaded with RAM, so it's a high speed setup. The downfall with this system, however, is if you need to work on your local system heavily, while rendering on that box, it cuts the efficiency of that machine and artist down drastically. Since we had several parts needed for the project, along with other projects under way, we knew we'd have this issue throughout, as we had with other projects in the past.

We decided we needed to expand our render power quickly, so it wouldn't affect our daytime efficiency. We knew our first step would be to acquire render nodes to cover the heavy workload. We looked into different model blades, full system racks, etc. In the end, we ended up dealing with Dustin Leifheit from Boxx Technologies, purchasing the company's newest renderBoxx systems. Though most render nodes are basically the same, when using the same guts, we liked the space-saving form of the renderBoxxes, and the fact that each box held two 8-core systems side-by-side. Since space is limited on the racks, these systems only took up four rack spaces, yet could hold five Boxxes across. That's a total of 10 computers in a 4RU space.

Another selling point to us was the upgradeability. Since the 8-core systems were based on the latest Intel Nehalem architecture, we knew we had the flexibility to upgrade when the 12 cores were released, but could use the 8-core systems immediately. Ultimately, that's the route we chose. We purchased the systems with 16GB of ram in each 8-core system to make sure we had the speed and memory to tackle any size project in the near future.

Once we had that decision set, we knew our next step was to find a solid render software solution. We did plenty of research, and all the latest products sounded competent for what we needed. However, one of our main concerns was having our Mac workstations talk easily with the PC render nodes.

After a bunch of trial and error with the top-rated products, we decided to go with Uberware Smedge because of the company's customer service and ease of communicating cross-platform. Even though every render software company says its product can easily work cross-platform, it seemed nearly impossible to get the few we tried to use the Macs and PCs on the same render. After a short time with Smedge, we were able to get all the systems communicating together flawlessly.

That enabled us to send our files to the render farm during the day to render away uninterrupted, while continuing to work locally. Once time frees up or we're ready to leave for the night, we simply add our systems into the render farm to give it more cores and power to create an extremely powerful farm.

Since we got the farm right at the beginning of the project, we didn't know what to expect. Once the system was installed, it worked effortlessly to help us reach our deadline and make changes up to the last minute without fear. It also enabled us to explore more and make sure we achieved the look we were seeking on the initial boards.

Shortly after Pushing Boundaries delivered to our ecstatic clients, the new 12-core systems were announced. We've since then upgraded to the latest 12-core Intel technology as planned. Our render system is now more powerful than ever, and it helps keep us on the cutting edge. In the end, we need to just smile and enjoy the benefits before the future 16 cores get announced, followed by 24 cores, 32 cores, 48 cores, and so on.

If there's one thing I've learned through technology and this crazy industry we're in, it's that our top-of-the-line render farm will be outdated, useless, and given to goodwill before this article is even published. It's a never ending, maddening cycle but in some demented way, I love it.

Josh Sahley is the creative director and founder of Monkeyhead, a motion design/production house in the Los Angeles area. The company works with an extensive range of clients including Red Bull, Disney, FX, and HBO. Pushing Boundaries will air soon, so keep checking your local listings.