The studio attributes its success with the Deadpool sequence to a cloud rendering platform they developed in-house called Conductor. In an interview with Art of VFX, they explain:
“All of Atomic Fiction’s heavy rendering is done with ConductorIO, a cloud rendering platform we developed for internal use, and have since spun off as a stand-alone company. On Deadpool, 7 million core hours were rendered in the cloud. 80% of the rendering on Deadpool occurred in just 8 weeks of the 36-week schedule, with one single week accounting for about 20%. This really demonstrates how important it is to be able to scale resources up and down. Another way to look at it is that we would have needed a local render farm of around 32,000 cores to get through that one week. That’s a lot of horsepower for any size company, let alone a mid-sized studio like Atomic Fiction.”
On their website, Atomic Fiction offers a beta version of the software.
“It encompasses the entire rendering workflow from end to end, managing uploads and downloads, queuing, security, and cloud resources with unmatched performance and efficiency,” the description reads. Some of the features include:
- The most widely-used 2D & 3D applications supported
- Scales massively; stays fast as workloads grow
- Integrates into custom pipelines
- Enterprise-grade cloud security from end to end
- Real-time cost tracking and management
- Automated data de-duplication for faster file transfers
- State-of-the-art cloud technologies built in at the core level
- Pay one all-inclusive price for what you use, by the minute
- Improve productivity by 20%; reduce rendering costs by 50%
If you’re an aspiring VFX designer register and check it out!
