As the Indian Animation, VFX, Gaming ecosystem evolves, one can see a lot of new business models come into play. In what is one such instance, Mumbai based Dux Soft today announced the launch of its Renderfarm and Facility Design & Management services targeted specifically at the Indian Animation, VFX vertical.
Dux is promoted by Hollywood based investor Amit Srivastava and will be headed by Pankaj Chaturvedi, with chief technology consultant on the project being the renowned Krishna Prasad also popularly known as KP in Indian Animation, VFX circles.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Dux Soft Business Head Pankaj Chaturvedi shared, “The Indian Animation, VFX vertical is scaling up fast and the work volumes are increasing exponentially. Of all the processes involved in animation and VFX production, rendering is amongst the most technically complex, demanding as well as costly affairs. In this context, we are extremely confident that our Renderfarm service is going to find favor with the industry, as it would offer large as well as small studios the option of utilizing our remote rendering services at a cost per output model even as studios could focus better on their creative competence”
“Besides we also have with us some of the most technically brilliant people in this business including the famed KP who is the chief technology consultant for the project. ” he added.
Krishna Prasad pointed out that “The facility will help lots of big and small post and animation houses to get their rendering executed without having any major impact on their capex. In general, small studios can‘t afford more servers to render a job. Even if the creative talent can complete the job in a couple of days, the render takes more than three to four days on the same workstations they use for their creative work. That means they block the resources which can be used to excute the next job, but still they cannot afford a faster renderfarm because fo the cost of servers and deployement and maintenance”
“In big studios the scenario is completely different, they can afford good number of servers but running cost (deployment and maintenance and electricity) is high, and after such huge investments at the end of the year, the resources will be used only for a maximum of 60%, in which scenario a 40% waste on resouces is a huge kill for big numbers. A renderfarm service can help them to deploy only half or less of the servers they need and rest they can hire from us for effective resources utilitsation and cost flow” he added.
Dux Soft shared that rendering could be done via various protocols including carry in renders, remote rendering over the internet and rendering via Local loop VPN tunnel.
Currently the facility is equipped with 50 Dual CPU Dual core servers with 4GB RAM config and are loaded with Linux specially designed High-performance throughput computing(HPTC), as well as a custom built job submission engine with accounting and exclusive user permission and groups to manage their sets of servers.