Abstract:The demand for rendering in film and television animation, special effects production and other industries is increasing, and 4K/6K and various high resolution will gradually become the mainstream. Local computing power and storage resources can no longer meet the existing task volume. With the evolution of the environment, CG industry has entered the fast lane of development. Jin Wei, CEO of Zanqi Technology, shared with us how the CG industry is advancing its services in cloud production and rendering.
This article is shared from Huawei Cloud Community “Top Level CG Industry Cloud Rendering Service Evolution Road”, the original author: audio and video steward.
The demand for rendering in film and television animation, special effects production and other industries is increasing, and 4K/6K and various high resolution will gradually become the mainstream. Local computing power and storage resources can no longer meet the existing task volume. With the evolution of the environment, CG industry has entered the fast lane of development. Jin Wei, CEO of Zanqi Technology, shared with us how the CG industry is advancing its services in cloud production and rendering.
01 Zanqi Technology
We may be relatively unfamiliar to Zanqi Technology, Zanqi Technology was founded in 2010, headquartered in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and other places have branches. At present, there are more than 360,000 users in China, most of them are enterprise users, and some of them are individual users. They choose Zanqi products for cloud production, rendering and transmission. Our mission is to “create the visual industry ecosystem, so that cloud computing brings infinite possibilities for creation”, with “cloud rendering tools” as the carrier, to provide the cloud rendering overall solutions and services for a number of industries. One of Zanqi’s products, “Xuan Yun”, is a SaaS that uses public clouds for rendering and production.
The entire Zanqi technology products are divided into: architectural design renderings, film and television animation, dumb cat cloud desktop and CGMAGIC plug-in. It is expected to meet with users in the industry in the second half of this year. I heard from the teacher that the cloud equipment can do some better production and production, while the cloud desktop is a cloud desktop built entirely based on GPU, which uses Nvidia’s RTX series, and the configuration will be higher than 2080 and 3080. In a more flexible and casual way, to provide convenient services to the creators and applicable groups.
The scenarios and industries targeted by our four products are roughly as shown in the figure above. The current full-scene collaboration has already provided the solution, which is available on Zanqi’s own website or on Huawei’s cloud marketplace. At the same time, we are actively cooperating with Huawei to promote the self-operation in the Yanxuan market. In Huawei’s own product system, we can also buy the full range of products of Zanqi.
The above are the qualifications and honors of Zanqi Technology. We are the strategic partner of Huawei Cloud and the core partner of Nvidia. Our products from PaaS to SaaS are self-developed.
In short, Zanqi Technology is an Internet enterprise integrating PaaS and SaaS, deeply engaged in vertical industries and serving CG industry.
The above diagram is a flowchart. The product passes through the PaaS layer management scheduling, and the SaaS layer port, and finally walks into the platform of cloud computing public cloud available order. In a word, all users can enjoy the computing power and convenience as well as various solutions and services brought by the public cloud at the first time through our products. This and the traditional go to the cloud, or local send a set of private environment or will have a big difference. As we all know, with the increasing demand for computing power and the access of video and CG industries, we have higher and higher requirements for solutions. Many local areas cannot meet the demand. At this time, the public cloud is the best solution. The SaaS service from the client to the last kilometer of the public cloud is very convenient.
So why would you choose to base it on a public cloud? In fact, Zanqi originally used the private cloud, and after buying 3,000 servers, he finally found that there were still problems. First of all, no matter how many servers you buy, you will not be able to effectively meet the needs of all types of users. When we moved all the environment to the public cloud, the operation and maintenance became lighter, and the ability to accept projects was more flexible. At the same time, the technical capabilities were empowered and supported by the public cloud, which was not possible before using the private cloud. To sum up, the use of public cloud improves the computing power and security to the highest level, especially the current cooperation with Huawei and some clouds, which can basically meet the needs of most domestic users. At present, Tencent and Alibaba are many of our users. For example, the CG animation content of King of Glory and Peace Elite Studio are all purchased from Xuanyun products. Storage, network, operation and maintenance, cost, management, and timeliness are all things that we found out after we used them. The best way to output and solve the whole rendering environment is through the bottom layer of the public cloud.
Zanqi is also actively pushing the entire CG industry to enter the public cloud ecosystem. We focus on these pieces, the bottom layer is our public cloud, and the middle PaaS layer is our self-developed, named Scorpion Architecture, which provides these components as shown in the figure above. The SaaS layer is in computing, collaboration, software, rendering, plugins, to network disk and process management software. Provide access to SaaS circle for all kinds of people in our designers. In fact, all these parts can be quickly used to various products of Zanqi through SaaS, and at the same time, they can land to the lowest LAAS layer more quickly, and use the computing power and storage of LAAS layer to carry out daily work. It’s all built on the public cloud, and the company probably has no more than 10 servers. At present, Zanqi has its own R&D team of nearly 60 employees. The server is also arranged on the cloud, and the environment on the cloud is used for testing and writing.
02 shading cloud platform
Zanqi is the platform of Rendering Xuan Yun. We provide stable PaaS service, convenient SaaS service, and all kinds of all-round services including manual labor for the whole industry. At present, the brand Xuanyun supports all kinds of software commonly used in the whole CG industry, and has made more than 1500 kinds of plug-ins by itself, which can be easily and quickly provided to artists and designers for cloud use with high cost performance. Last year, our products went abroad for the first time. In cooperation with Huawei, we set up an overseas farm in Singapore, officially providing services for customers in Southeast Asia and some Europe. At present, the feedback is very good, saying that the quality of our Chinese products is reliable and the cost performance is relatively good, which is all thanks to the support and help of public cloud for domestic SaaS.
Rending Cloud has also been using Intel Xerox Extensible Processor, basically in this area or quite a high lead. If we are in a private cloud environment, it is very difficult to use the latest Intel technology, and in rendering this scene, the chip component technology is directly affecting performance and cost performance. We are also honored to maintain good cooperation with Intel, and together with Huawei Cloud, we are currently the best in the industry in terms of memory, collaboration, I/O performance, and security. For example, we have some scenes to do special films, we can provide a single machine with a core CPU of more than 200 cores, memory up to 1TB. This is very rare in the current environment, and fills a gap in our industry, which only the public cloud can provide some of the equipment.
At present, Xuanyun provides some rendering services for more than 100,000 architectural design industries in China, including architectural animation, interior decoration, landscape and so on.
The above is a film and animation project. Every year, we have more than dozens of films, series and animations brought to millions of consumers through the products of Rending Cloud. Including this year’s Lunar New Year, there are a total of 7 Lunar New Year films, and 3 of them choose the products of “shading cloud”.
03 Insights into the rendering industry
In terms of the development status of the rendering industry, from the point of view of the entire digital content, including the digital upgrade covers more and more digital assets, in fact, the demand for rendering is increasing, whether it is pre-rendering or real-time rendering, the current situation from 2K, 3K to 4K, 6K, recently we received a lot of projects and 8K to 16K. This kind of work that we want to do with high resolution, has become more and more. Local computing power, hardware and software are difficult to meet and guarantee timeliness, including rendering projects are mostly not standard, because of the different levels of technical personnel, Party A’s requirements are different, our products are basically thousands of people. In addition to some schools, training classes, may do more standard, into the society, our non-standard scene will be very much.
In the future, with the development and change of the environment, we predict that the whole CG industry will be better and better. The cultural industry, including the Chinese market, will become larger and larger, and the division of labor within the industry will be more clear. More and more SaaS manufacturers like us will specialize in vertical provision of a piece of service. Including the future of hardware and software, storage, transmission resources will be higher requirements.
During the epidemic, there was also an increase in the number of people working together in multiple places, which had a great impact on our industry. For example, some companies are stratified. Normal employees work together in the office, but they suddenly find that they can’t go to the office, and all the work has been stopped. Although the phone and email are connected, they can’t get the same data and assets, which means all the projects have been stopped. This also puts forward new requirements for our industry, and we will continue to come up with new products to solve the problem of multiple people working together.
In addition, there is an increase in the demand for customized scenes. For example, our customer Ali needs to customize their own scenes, so we need to match the requirements of Ali’s process and work. Whether it is an Internet enterprise or a game enterprise or a video enterprise, there will be a demand in this respect. This will be a trend in the future, and Zankee’s products will also serve and build well.
On the movie side, if we look at Avatar, at two hours per frame, it would take a server over 300 years to complete the rendering. If its machine calculation force, no matter how much time compression, in fact, its time will be relatively long. Take a look at the film “Alita” two years ago. As far as I know, the rendering cost of this film alone exceeded 100 million RMB, and the final rendering was done in New Zealand. The company set up a rendering farm in the local area. After the film was finished, the local weather department tested the temperature of the whole town during the rendering period, which was 2 degrees higher than the temperature in previous years, which was the heat emitted by the server. Now this kind of special effects blockbuster, if do not have to go to the cloud, basically can not be made in China, although there is such technology, but such a cost performance and long time is unacceptable, the audience also can not wait.
In the future, including what Xuanyun is doing now, we will provide large ultra-high performance storage. First of all, there will be no problem in transmission, and tens of thousands of servers will be concurrent to meet customers’ customized needs. What we often see now is a client asking “Can we do it in 30 minutes on 1,000 servers?” and we can do it on 2,000 servers in 10 minutes. This is the current cloud market in China, and we have the ability to provide it to customers at the right price at any time.
Most CPUs are 32 or 64, memory is 128 or more, and just run. Storage generally starts at 50 to 100TB, which we can meet. At the same time, we can support at least 10 movies. Thanks to these, it is not because we have good products, but because our country is in such a good era, our country has such good infrastructure, there are so many good cloud manufacturers, to provide us with such good services. So I think it’s lucky for my generation to have so much support. If we push forward 5 years or 10 years, it is unimaginable. In the past, it was done in small workshops, with low level and efficiency.
Future development plans
In the future, the standard we pursue is still full TD support and service, except for rendering technology, we are a bonus. At present, we also undertake a lot of overseas projects. In fact, our domestic CG industry is not weak. Part of Harry Potter 7 and Transformers 5 were done in China. In the beginning, Hollywood blockbusters would not leave Hollywood, but gradually they believe in the level and ability of the Chinese people, so more and more Hollywood films are top production, completed by Chinese studios. In recent years, Chinese games have also gone global. The original authors are all Chinese companies, and we will do this. In terms of computing power and storage, we will continue to guarantee the following collaboration and transmission, which are also some advantages of us and the public cloud.
Let’s talk briefly about our products that have not been launched yet. The name is easy to remember and it is called Dumb Cat. The English word is Demo, which can help our users make samples anytime and anywhere. Why is it the most applied desktop cloud solution? Because it was the industry’s first 100% GPU-based device, every desktop cloud backend was a GPU, whether it was a single card or a half card. Half the performance of the card is about 2060, maybe a little higher, and the video memory is extremely large, 24 megabytes for a single card. The application scenarios are cloud-based design, collaborative office, asset sharing, etc. At the same time, the cloud desktop is also in collaboration with Huawei and Nvidia, and has been authorized by Nvidia.
If the partners of our group have the needs of remote collaborative office, cloud storage, software use and one-click deployment, all can be used. The software is not on the market yet, but some of our customers are using it, for example in the film and television industry in the composite area. The composition of some special films requires strong computing power and resources. At present, the larger special film manufacturers in Beijing and Shenzhen have been using dumb cats. But our current deployment capacity is limited, still in advance, is expected in this year’s Q3 will be officially commercial, interested can download a trial. This product is not expensive, we used to buy a supercomputer workstation cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of large, the emergence of the cloud desktop has become elastic, to charge by the hour, when the use of the boot, when not released, this is the cloud desktop to bring a future scene.
This is also the future of the whole design process to get through a direction, including XDemoer, XTrack, Xrender and so on. 14
Now there are more and more large data production and production choose to buy SaaS software, with the bottom layer of the cloud to complete the whole process, which has become a trend. In fact, it was difficult for us to push it up in the early days. We did not trust the public cloud, but over the years we have come, and we believe that the public cloud will become the main cloud in the future.
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