Resources & FAQ

Q: What are the user scenarios?

A: Large-scale rendering scenarios, including but not limited to:

1. Animated feature films and TV series
2. Visual effects of TV and feature film
3. Advertisement
   
4. Game cut-scenes
5. VR / AR experiences
6. Product information videos
7. Architectural Visualization
   
   

Q: Who should use it?

A: Production Teams, Studios and Render Farms. Especially those who have used or are using Thinkbox Deadline.

Q: How does it work?

A: This solution will automatically deploy and configure a set of cloud rendering architecture, including rendering scheduling platform, remote desktop and shared file system, using Deadline and NICE DCV software, and pre-configured for mounting and calling between instances.

Deadline provides management of rendering tasks and schedules rendering nodes to complete rendering tasks.

NICE DCV provides a graphical remote desktop for graphically managing rendering tasks, viewing rendering results, transferring files, and logging into other EC2 instances as a bastion.

Shared file systems (such as EFS, JuiceFS, etc.) provide unified media asset file storage for the rendering nodes to use materials and output results.

Q: What customer experience is like?

A: After logging in remotely with NICE DCV remote desktop, you can open the pre-installed Deadline Monitor software in the graphical interface to visually view and manage rendering tasks.

Q: How much does it cost?

A: This solution is offered for free. You will be charged based on resources used in the cloud. The cost of resources includes fixed cost and floating cost.

Fixed cost mainly comes from: three EC2 instances, two NAT Gateways, and one EFS. Taking Ningxia region as an example, based on rough estimation, the daily cost will not exceed 150 RMB (purchasing EC2 Reserved Instances will further reduce costs).

Floating costs mainly comes from: compute, storage, and traffic. These are related to the amount of resources actually used. You will not be charged when there is no rendering task.

Q: How much development effort needed to use it?

A: This solution is ready to use once deployed, there is no extra development effort needed. Since this is an open-source solution, you can do your own customization based on the source code in GitHub, if the out-of-the-box features don’t meet your requirement.

Q: Can I deploy the solution in any region?

A: This solution currently only supports deployment in Amazon Web Services China region (Beijing region, Ningxia region). To deploy in other regions, you can use the VFX burst rendering framework on Amazon Web Services or the Render Farm Deployment Kit.