Vision Globale, a Canadian production company which has created effects for movies like X-Men: Days of Future Past uses Qube!, PipelineFX’s render farm manager, To manage the complexity, the studio relies on Qube! to streamline the process of installing and maintaining software. Vision Globale’s business ranges from studio hire to stereoscopic conversion. Its visual effects division alone employs over 100 people.
Although much of its VFX work is created using Maya and the Arnold renderer, the studio makes use of a wide range of other software, including 3D applications Houdini, Softimage and 3Ds Max, compositing package Nuke, gaseous fluid dynamics engine FumeFX, and simulation tool Golaem Crowd, all running on a mixture of operating systems. To complicate matters further, Vision Globale’s hundreds of render nodes are also used for transcoding work, creating a potentially production-breaking tangle of tools and job types.
“We can use simple commands to install applications on every node on the farm, or update with newly released code,’ says Hans Payer, Vision Globale’s Pipeline and 3D animation developer. “In a few minutes, we can set up and maintain our entire render farm.’
For Payer, another crucial benefit of Qube! is the Python API, which enables the studio to define its own custom job types. “The ability to write job types allows us to tailor our implementation to our specific needs,’ he says. “Since (those) needs change constantly, we constantly refine, alter and optimise each job type’s code. We never feel limited, since we have 100% control over calculations.’
This power to customise job types on the fly also makes it easy to integrate new software into the pipeline. When Vision Globale adopted Golaem Crowd for Race, director Stephen Hopkins’ upcoming biopic of Jesse Owens, it chose to integrate it into its existing Maya job type rather than creating a new one. “It allows us to centralise all the logic for Maya processes into one location,’ says Payer. “Sharing common tasks between different types of processes, such as rendering, caching and simulation, simplifies the implementation.’
Another recent addition to the pipeline is Houdini, which the studio used on Fallen, a new romantic fantasy by Oscar-nominated director Scott Hicks. With it, the studio’s technical directors can create complex effects trees, running to many hundreds of nodes. “We had to find ways to distribute (all the associated) tasks, like processing caches, simulations, renders, composites and file conversions with complex dependencies,’ says Payer. “Centralising (everything) into one Qube! job type simplifies the code and facilitates its maintenance.’
