Ok this is way fun and drags me back to the days I was diligently trying to build a 3D rendering engine from first principles (sort of, I had Glide to put stuff on the screen).
The renderer is perceptually better than the one that is included in my CAD package (TurboCAD) for pretty much all materials. So I'm guessing they will snarf it and dump the proprietary renderer and replace it with this stuff if they can.
But the really interesting idea that popped into my head was this; could Google offer 'rendering as a service'?
Specifically they have a zillion machines, many of which are doing nothing important, and they have this rendering package, and they have a scheduler that can put things on any machine. Imagine a service where you sent them a suitably detailed model description, and a set of lights, could they send you back a rendered image? Could you parameterize changes to the model description over time so that they could send you images in time based on your models? Could they do say 480 renders 'free' per month and then maybe $0.19/render over 480 in a single month?
Could you create a studio of modellers who would design models, and animators that would animate those models over time, and a director who would compose those animations into scenes? This is basically Pixar without the expensive renderfarm. Does that enable new studios to bring their own vision to life? Does it offer a cost effective service to places like Pixar which allows Google to make money on otherwise idle resources? Curious minds want to know :-)
Okay that is pretty close, and acquired by Google in 2014. So presumably it is possible to be a small CGI shop and use this as your back end. Now I'm wondering if the economics pencil out. Clearly there was something that motivated Google to buy them.
They work just fine, the product is one of many that's used by shops now. GCP even recently launched a LA region and had an entire day dedicated to the local VFX shops. Nothing stops you from just running a bunch of VMs which many do and they have rolled out the Filestore NFS to make shared disks easier too.
Is that a recent shift? I remember talking to someone from a VFX shop a few years ago, and they made it sound like back then anything cloud was a no-go due to their customers requiring material to stay in-house for fear of leaks.
Yes, smaller studios were early but now the majors like Sony Imageworks are all in. The cloud is a great fit for most of their rendering jobs and security is no different (if not better handled by the cloud).
Recent enough - at a Google event earlier in 2018 it was mentioned that GCP was now compliant with most (if not all) of the major studios’ security requirements.
The renderer is perceptually better than the one that is included in my CAD package (TurboCAD) for pretty much all materials. So I'm guessing they will snarf it and dump the proprietary renderer and replace it with this stuff if they can.
But the really interesting idea that popped into my head was this; could Google offer 'rendering as a service'?
Specifically they have a zillion machines, many of which are doing nothing important, and they have this rendering package, and they have a scheduler that can put things on any machine. Imagine a service where you sent them a suitably detailed model description, and a set of lights, could they send you back a rendered image? Could you parameterize changes to the model description over time so that they could send you images in time based on your models? Could they do say 480 renders 'free' per month and then maybe $0.19/render over 480 in a single month?
Could you create a studio of modellers who would design models, and animators that would animate those models over time, and a director who would compose those animations into scenes? This is basically Pixar without the expensive renderfarm. Does that enable new studios to bring their own vision to life? Does it offer a cost effective service to places like Pixar which allows Google to make money on otherwise idle resources? Curious minds want to know :-)