Polygon Pictures in Tokyo manages the internal compute resources
and render farm for their animation production schedules using
Thinkbox Software’s Deadline.
Polygon Pictures Puts Deadline Behind Animation Render Farm |
Polygon Pictures, PPI, in Tokyo creates animation for projects across a broad range of media including films, games, exhibitions and broadcast television. Among their TV credits are two full CG TV series, Daytime Emmy Award-winners‘Transformers Prime’and‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’, as well as‘Tron: Uprising’, an Annie Award-winner. To help the company make the most of computing resources to cover their production schedules, PPI usesThinkbox Software Deadlineto manage its render farm. |
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“As the number of software tools and settings we had to support within our own system grew, and the maintenance became more complicated, we had to consider a new way to manage rendering. We chose Deadline, taking into account its wide application support and the options to extend it through scripting,” saidKeiichi Kamedafrom Polygon Pictures’ R&D group. |
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Tron: Uprising |
Keiichi said, “At the beginning, we managed our jobs by priority only. As multiple projects required more jobs to run simultaneously, priority assignment became complicated between projects, so we started to make project pools and changed the order of pools on each node. With Deadline, we can arrange the order of pools on each node by estimating the usage of resources for jobs on a weekly basis. We’ve found managing pools under one repository to be a very efficient way to handle jobs. With our current settings, if a higher priority job is sent to a render node, it must either wait until current jobs are completed or halt to begin jobs with the highest priority.” |
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Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine |
Working on Windows 7 64-bit, with some Apple OS X, PPI configures mounting drives and applications based on a project’s access security, and also customizes existing submissions and plug-in scripts. Since Deadline natively supports a range of applications, PPI was able to integrate directly it into their pipeline. “Along with rendering from the artists’ 3D applications like Maya, NUKE, Houdini and 3ds Max, we also use Deadline for several differentbatch processeslike converting image sequences into QuickTime files,” explainedAtsushi Tamori, lighting and compositing group leader at PPI. |
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Currently, PPI is working on ‘Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine’ directed by Hiroyuki Seshita and ‘Ronia the Robber’s Daughter’ directed by Goro Miyazaki, whose father was animator Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli. It is also putting effort into creating a new, original Japanese visual style by combining its long experience in production and capacity for technical development, with the widely recognized tradition of Japanese animation. www.thinkboxsoftware.com |
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Transformers Prime |