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Thinkbox's Render Management Solution Helps CGI Studio Burn Rubber
25 Aug, 2011 By: Cadalyst StaffBurrows CGI processes massive vehicle visualization files in less time with Deadline software.
Burrows, a division of global advertising agency Young & Rubicam, maintains its own CGI studio with locations in London and Detroit. Focused primarily on product visualization, Burrows CGI creates photorealistic stills and animations for clients such as Ford and British automaker McLaren. These marketing assets are used in applications ranging from print ads and web-based configurators to television commercials and point-of-sale media. 
Burrows CGI creates photorealistic images for automakers including McLaren.
To create these images and sequences, Burrows CGI uses Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya for 3D animation, and the Foundry’s Nuke and Adobe After Effects for compositing. To process the CAD data files supplied by clients — which may be 100 GB or more — and their own artistic renderings, Burrows adopted Deadline, a render farm–management solution from Thinkbox Software.
Software Selection
According to Burrows Technical Director Mike Owen, the studio's choice of software was based on several factors, including the infrastructure required to implement the program. "Deadline doesn’t rely on a central computer manager application attached to a database that has to be running all the time to control all of the machines; it just needs a basic, central file server," he said. "With a reasonable system and connectivity, aside from buying Deadline itself, there's really nothing else needed."
Because 3ds Max is the studio's primary 3D animation software, Burrows CGI evaluated product integration carefully. "When Deadline receives a frame of animation to process, it keeps the application open and renders on it without having to continually relaunch," said Owen. "The one-and-a-half minutes it takes to load Max every time in some other solutions really eats into your render time."
Finding a solution with a simple user interface was also a high priority for Burrows CGI, Owen noted. "Our artists access and monitor their own jobs directly. We don't need a dedicated wrangler; Deadline is a self-service solution, and artists find it really easy to use. The color-coding is great: You see red or brown, that’s bad. Green? Good. We just put global rules in place at an administration level so no one can affect anything beyond their own files."
The Need for Speed
Because the high-resolution files it works with are so large, Burrows CGI frequently has need for Deadline's tile-rendering capabilities. "We work with [images of 40,000–50,000 pixels] all the time. With Deadline we can break up those large images and process each on a different render node; it's a lot quicker than sitting on one machine for three days. Deadline supports a wide range of file formats — multichannel images, 32-bit EXR with lots of channels for effects — and reassembles all of the tiles into a final image flawlessly." 
File sizes for the automotive renderings, such as this image of a Ford Focus, commonly reach 50,000 pixels.
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