The demand for rendering in film and television animation, special effects production and other industries is increasing, and 4K/6K and various high resolutions will become the mainstream one after another. Local computing power and storage resources can no longer meet the existing tasks. With the evolution of the environment, the development of CG industry has entered the fast track of development. In this conference, we have invited Mr. Jin Wei, CEO of Zanqi Technology, to share with us how Zanqi Technology promotes services in cloud production and rendering in CG industry.

The text/Jin Wei

Organizing/LiveVideoStack

Hello everyone, I am the CEO of Zenqi Technology. It is my great honor to be invited by this conference to share with you how CG industry is advancing services in cloud production and rendering.

This sharing will be carried out from the above aspects.

01 Zanqi Technology

You may be unfamiliar with Zanqi Technology, Zanqi Technology was founded in 2010, headquartered in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other places have branches. At present, there are more than 360,000 users in China, most of which 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 to create unlimited possibilities”, with “cloud rendering tools” as the carrier, to provide a number of industries with cloud rendering overall solutions and services.

“Rendering cloud”, one of Zanqi’s products, is the only SaaS that uses public cloud for rendering and production in China.

The whole zanqi technology products are divided into the above several pieces, effect diagram architectural design class, film and television animation class, dumb cat cloud desktop and CGMAGIC plug-in. It is expected to meet users in the industry in the second half of this year. Before, I heard the teacher said that high provisioning equipment on cloud can do better production and production. However, As the only gPUS based cloud desktop in China, It adopts Nvidia’S RTX series, and its configuration will be higher than 2080 and 3080. In a more flexible and casual way, to provide convenient services for creators and applicable groups. So we have a total of four products on the market this year.

The scenarios and industries targeted by our four products are roughly as shown in the figure above. At present, the cooperation of the whole scene has provided a solution, which can be bought on Zanqi’s own website or huawei cloud market. At the same time, we are actively cooperating with Huawei to promote the self-management of Yanxuan market. In huawei’s own product system, we can also buy the whole line of Zanqi products.

The above are the qualifications and honors of Zanqi Technology. We are a strategic partner of Huawei cloud and a core partner of Nvidia. Our own products from PaaS to SaaS are self-developed.

To put it simply, Zanqi Technology is an Internet enterprise integrating PaaS and SaaS, deeply engaged in vertical industry and serving CG industry.

The figure above is a flow chart. Our product manages scheduling through zanqi PaaS layer, ports of SaaS layer, and finally steps into the platform of cloud computing public cloud available sequence. In a word, all users can enjoy the computing power and convenience brought by public cloud as well as various solutions and services at the first time through our products. This will be very different from the traditional cloud, or a set of local private environment. As we all know, with the increasing demand for computing power, we have higher and higher requirements for solutions for the access of video and CG industries. Many local enterprises cannot meet the demand, so public cloud is the best solution. Zanqi from the client to the public cloud the last kilometer of SaaS services, very convenient very convenient.

So why choose to build on the public cloud? We actually started out as a private cloud, and after we bought 3,000 servers, we still had problems. First of all, the more servers you buy, the more you can’t effectively guarantee the needs of all kinds of users. When we moved all the environment to the public cloud, not only the maintenance and operation became lighter, but also the ability to accept projects became more flexible. At the same time, the technical ability also got a lot of power and support from the public cloud, which was beyond my reach before. To sum up, computing power and security are undoubtedly the highest, especially the current cooperation with Huawei and some cloud cooperation, which can basically meet the needs of most users in China. At present, Tencent and Ali are many of our users. CG animation content of King of Glory and Peace Elite Studio are all purchased with shading cloud products. Storage, network, operation and maintenance, cost, management and time limitation are all found after we use them, the best way of the whole rendering environment process is to complete the output and solution through the bottom layer of the public cloud.

We are also actively promoting the whole CG industry to enter the public cloud ecosystem. For these blocks, the lowest layer is our public cloud, and the middle PaaS layer is our self-developed scorpion architecture, which respectively provides these components as shown in the figure above. The SaaS layer is computing power, collaboration, software, rendering, plug-ins to web disk and process management software. Providing access to the SaaS sphere for a wide variety of our designers. In fact, these parts can be used to various products of Zanqi very quickly through SaaS, and at the same time land to the lowest LAYER LAAS layer more quickly, and use the computing power and storage of LAAS layer for daily work. This set is all built on the public cloud. Our company probably has no more than ten servers at home. Zanqi now has a research and development team of nearly 60 employees, and servers in the cloud, where he tests and writes.

02 Shading cloud platform

Zanqi rendering is the rendering cloud platform, we provide the whole industry with stable PaaS services, convenient SaaS services, as well as the full range of services within the manual. At present, the brand “Shinecloud” supports all kinds of software commonly used in the whole CG industry. We have made more than 1500 kinds of plug-ins, which can be used by artists and designers on the cloud easily and quickly, and the cost performance is still good. Last year, our products went abroad for the first time. In cooperation with Huawei, we established an overseas farm in Singapore and formally provided services for customers in Southeast Asia and some European countries. At present, the feedback is good, saying that our Chinese products have reliable quality and good cost performance, which is due to the support and help of public cloud to domestic SaaS.

Hill shading has also been using Intel XEON scalable processors, basically in this area or quite high degree of leadership. If we are in a private cloud environment, it is difficult to use the latest Intel technology, and in rendering this scene, the chip composition technology directly affects the performance and cost performance. We are also proud to have a great relationship with Intel and, together with Huawei Cloud, are currently the best in the industry in terms of memory, collaboration, I/O performance and security. For example, we do special films for some scenes. We can provide a single machine with a core CPU of more than 200 cores and a memory of 1TB. This is very rare in the current environment and fills a gap in our industry where only the public cloud can provide some equipment.

This is about some of our cases, currently shading cloud for more than 100,000 architectural design industry in China to provide some rendering services, including architectural animation, interior decoration, landscape and so on.

The above is as a film and animation project, we have more than dozens of films, series and animation every year through the shading of cloud products, to millions of consumers.

This is this year’s New Year file, a total of 7 New Year’s movies, there are 3 chose to render cloud products.

Insight into the rendering industry

In terms of the development status of the rendering industry, from the perspective of the whole digital content, including the digital upgrade, more and more digital assets are getting bigger and bigger, and the demand for rendering is getting bigger and bigger. Whether it is pre-rendering or real-time rendering, the status quo is from 2K, 3K to 4K and 6K. Recently, we have received many projects with 8K to 16K. This is the kind of work that we have to do in high resolution, and it’s getting more and more and more. Local computing power, hardware and software are difficult to meet and guarantee timeliness, including there are no standards for most rendering projects. Because of the different levels of technical personnel and requirements of Party A, our products are basically thousands of faces. In addition to some schools, training classes, may be relatively standard, after society, we will have a lot of non-standard scenes.

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 also become bigger and bigger, and the division of labor within the industry will become clearer. More and more SaaS vendors like us will provide a vertical service. In the future, the requirements on hardware and software, storage and transmission resources will also be higher.

During the epidemic, there are more and more people working together in multiple places, which has a great impact on our industry. For example, some companies are stratified. Normal employees work together in the office, but suddenly find that they cannot go to the office. All work has stopped. This has also put forward new requirements for our industry, and we will continue to put forward new products to solve the problem of multi-person collaborative work.

There is also the increasing demand for customized scenes. For example, ali, our client, needs to customize his scenes, so we need to match ali’s process and work requirements. No matter it is the Internet enterprise or the game enterprise or the video enterprise, will have the demand in this respect. This will be a trend in the future, and Zanqi’s products will also be well served and built.

On the movie side, if we look at Avatar, at 2 hours per frame, it would take a server over 300 years to complete the rendering. Given how much computing power it has and how much time it compresses, it actually takes longer. If you look at alita, a film made two years ago, as far as I know, the film’s rendering cost alone exceeded 100 million RMB, and the final rendering was completed in New Zealand. The company built its own rendering farm in the local area. When the film was finished, the local weather department did a test. During the rendering period, the temperature of the whole town was 2 degrees higher than the previous year, which was the heat emitted by the server. Now look at this kind of special effects blockbuster, if you don’t have to go to the cloud, it is basically impossible to do it in China. Although there is such technology, the cost performance and length are unacceptable, and the audience can’t wait.

In the future, including what we are doing now, we provide large ultra-high performance storage, first of all, there is no problem in transmission, tens of thousands of servers concurrently, to meet the needs of customer customization. Now we often encounter a scenario where the client asks “can we use 1,000 servers and finish in 30 minutes”, while we can finish it with 2,000 servers in 10 minutes. This is the current cloud market in China, and we have the ability to provide customers with appropriate cost performance at any time.

For movies, the concurrency is 3000 to 5000 servers. Most of the cpus are 32 or 64, and the memory is 128 or larger, so we can run directly. Generally, the storage is 50 to 100TB, and we can support at least 10 movies concurrently. Thanks to these, in fact, it is not that we have good products, but that our country is in such a good era, our country has such good infrastructure, there are so many good cloud manufacturers, provide us with such good services. So I think it is the luck of our generation of practitioners to have so many strong supports. If we go back five years or ten years, it is unimaginable. In the past, it was all done in small workshops with low level and efficiency.

Future development plan

The standard we will pursue in the future is full TD support and service, except for rendering technology, we will give it as a bonus. At present, we also undertake a lot of overseas projects. In fact, our domestic FILM and television CG industry is not poor. Part of Harry Potter 7 and Transformers 5 were made in China. In the beginning, Hollywood blockbusters would not leave Hollywood, but gradually they believed in the level and ability of Chinese people, so more and more Hollywood movies are made by Chinese studios. In recent years, Chinese games have also gone global, and the original authors are all Chinese companies, which we will do. In terms of computing power and storage, we will continue to guarantee the following coordination and transmission, which are also some advantages of us and the public cloud.

Let’s briefly talk about our product that has not been launched yet. It is easier to remember its name as “Daomao”, which means Demo in English. It can help our users make samples anytime and anywhere. Why is it the most application-oriented desktop cloud solution? Because it’s the first 100 percent GPU-based desktop cloud, every desktop cloud backend is a GPU, whether it’s a single card or a half card. Half card performance is about 2060, maybe a little bit higher, and the video memory is extremely large, 24 megabytes per card. The application scenarios are cloud design, collaborative office, asset sharing, etc. Meanwhile, the cloud desktop is also cooperating with Huawei and Nvidia, and is authorized by Nvidia.

If our community partners have a need for remote collaborative work, cloud storage, software use, and one-click deployment, all of these can be used. The software is not on the market yet, but some of our customers are using it, for example, in the synthesis area of the film and television industry. Some special film synthesis needs powerful computing power and resources, at present in Beijing, Shenzhen, relatively large special film manufacturers have been using the cat. However, our deployment capacity is limited at present, and we are continuing to push forward. It is expected to be officially commercialized in Q3 of this year. If you are interested, you can download and try it out. This product is not expensive, we used to buy a supercomputer workstation cost tens of thousands of yuan, the large cost of hundreds of thousands, the emergence of the cloud desktop has become flexible, charging by the hour, when the use of the power on, when not to release, this is a cloud desktop brought about the future of a scene.

This is also a direction to get through the whole design process in the future, including XDEMOER, XTRACK, XRENDER and so on.

Today’s sharing is mainly about the introduction of our company and the impact of cloud on our industry. Finally, I will play a clip, which is the clip of some films we made in the last two years. These films are all from cloud, and most of them are cooperation with Huawei.

Now more and more large-scale data production and production are choosing to purchase SaaS software, using the cloud to complete the whole process, this is becoming a trend. In fact, it was difficult for us to push it in the early days, and we didn’t trust public cloud very much. But after years of experience, we think it will become mainstream in the future. I also hope that everyone here will support our home-made software and home-made cloud platform.

That’s all for my sharing, thank you!