Render farm management software increases efficiency, maximizes throughput and promotes easy integration with key pipeline components; See Qube! 6.6 at SIGGRAPH 2014.
Los Angeles, CA -- PipelineFX, creator of the leading render farm management software for VFX, will enable production companies to create a more efficient pipeline with the release of Qube! 6.6. The new Smart Share feature helps studios achieve maximum throughput, while Universal Callbacks and Flight Checks promote tight integration with production management/reporting tools so Qube! can be pipeline friendly from day one.
“As pipelines grow more sophisticated, the need to protect against bottlenecks becomes even more important,” said Richard Lewis, CEO of PipelineFX. “From customer discussions, it’s obvious that efficiency, multi-platform support and easy integration with both new and legacy tools is where Qube! needs to be. Qube! 6.6 takes them there.”
“Qube! 6.6 has been our sole render manager on films like “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” “Noah,” and “Rio 2,” said David Mitchelson, Production Systems Engineer at Deluxe and Qube! 6.6 beta tester. “We put a huge emphasis on stability and it has yet to disappoint. Features like “Flight Check” are great because they allow us to create custom scripts that prevent jobs that are going to create bad renders from ever running on the farm. This helps keep us on track and on schedule.”
New Qube! 6.6 Features
- Smart Share: Improves overall render pipeline throughput by automatically re-assigning idle workers once they conclude a job without intervention from an artist or wrangler in a fair, balanced and controllable way
- Universal Callbacks: Some jobs require an action every time they are run on the farm. To help, universal callbacks are automatically executed for every job, instance or frame, giving operators an easy way to maintain integration with other software and scripts
- Flight Checks: Registers scripts that will be executed on a worker immediately before or after a job or task runs. Use cases include ensuring assets that are essential to the job exist, pushing or pulling data from a production tracking system for targeted jobs or tasks, and/or transferring the results of a render job to a studio’s dailies system
- ArtistView improvements: Centralized preferences and plugins; job, frame, and instance filters (similar to WranglerView); OpenEXR image support in the preview window, as well as a new “thumbnails” tab with mouseover information
- New platform support: All Autodesk 2015 products and Ubuntu 12.04 Linux are fully supported; Python 2.7 supported on applicable OS platforms
- Windows platform improvements: An upgraded version of MySQL server (5.5.37) is bundled to significantly improve supervisor performance and Python “load-once” jobs are now fully supported
“Efficiency is the easiest way to weather storms and increase your margins,” added Lewis. “You can’t control everything, but with Qube!, you can control that.”
Customers currently on subscription can download version 6.6 immediately from the PipelineFX ftp site. Please contact support@pipelinefx.com (link sends e-mail) to request a 6.6 license.
Source: PipelineFX
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
