Pipelinefx, a leading provider of render farm management software for 3D animation and interactive entertainment companies, will demonstrate version 4.0 of its flagship product, qube!, at SIGGRAPH 2005, being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from July 31 to Aug. 4.
The new version of qube! will feature new performance and usability features, elevated compatibility with several popular graphics tools and an enhanced graphical user interface (GUI) called qubic. Enhanced support for applications, including Maya, SOFTIMAGE|XSI, 3DS Max, Shake, Nuke, mental ray, as well as compatibility with the latest version of Apples operating system, OSX Tiger (version 10.4) will be demonstrated.
Render farm management is a mission critical activity for film, 3D animation and visual effects. Increasingly, state-of-the-art computer game companies are using this technology to process art assets and distribute the game build process. Render farm management software is the glue that holds the workflow pipeline together allowing artists using a wide variety of tools to create high quality shots or build sophisticated computer games.
We have focused on enhancing performance and usability to meet the increasing demands of modern development environments, said Troy Brooks, cto of Pipelinefx. For example, configuring the qube! Supervisor is now even easier with a new graphic interface, job execution under Windows has been simplified and performance has also been improved by providing realtime license checking, which reduces the number of lost jobs due to insufficient licenses at job execution time. Other performance features include a multi-threaded worker, which improves communication and increases reliability via a self-healing mechanism.
qube! was originally developed for Square USAs 2,000-processor render farm at a cost of more than $2.5 million. It was used to produce FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN. Pipelinefx acquired the rights to the software in 2002 and the companys technical team began enhancing the product with a complete re-write incorporating a variety of patent-pending techniques for batch queuing and process control. The softwares architecture supports the ability to achieve deep integration with all of the artist tools used by animators and game companies so that demanding workflow pipelines could be created. The software helps optimize studio hardware assets speeding up the rendering and game build processes that are often bottlenecks in film and game productions.
Interactive entertainment and digital media are tremendous growth markets that hold great potential for Pipelinefx, said Jeff Au, md of PacifiCap Group, Hawaiis largest venture capital firm and Pipelinefx venture capital investor. This new release demonstrates the companys strong commitment to providing its customers with the ultimate render farm management system for these fast growing markets.
Pipelinefxs customer base includes Electronic Arts, Radical Ent., Lucas Arts, Mainframe Ent., Reel FX Creative Studios, Frame Set & Match, Switch VFX and Pratt Institute.
Built by industry professionals for the most demanding 3D animation and game production environments, qube! Remote Control is a next-generation enterprise class server farm management system built for environments as large 20 to 10,000 processors or more. qube! is highly customizable, extensively scalable and can be integrated into any production workflow. qube! operates in Red Hat Linux, Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 and Mac OS X environments.
Pipelinefx (www.pipelinefx.com), with headquarters in downtown Honolulu, and sales offices in Los Angeles, California, was founded in 2002 and markets its class leading software to the 3D animation, vfx, video and game markets worldwide.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
