17 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
to scale as the Mini Moon’s rendering capabilities expanded. The team opted for AWS Thinkbox Deadline, which is a rendering management system that enables render farms to extend on-premises rendering to AWS, and scale rendering workloads to hundreds, or even thousands, of cores in minutes. Roudenis states: “The engineers at Thinkbox have provided us with a high level of expertise and support for Deadline and understand its crucial role in our production pipeline.” Since 2017, the team has submitted 16,013 jobs, which included 5,991,632 tasks that produced 31,243,872 frames for the 34-minute Signs of Life show. Yeung boasts that: “Deadline has been instrumental in orchestrating the data, tasks and render nodes into a symphony, which we use to compose our melody of pixels.” As a result of this efficiency, the team at Griffith Observatory’s Satellite studio concluded that AWS Thinkbox Deadline would be its “central hub for all things rendering in the future”. CRAFTING THE COSMOS Art director and well-known astronomical artist Don Dixon reveals some challenges presented by the tricky canvas on which the
– such as a planet – the surface nearest the camera begins to bulge forward and creates a strange effect that makes it look smaller than desired. One solution for this, Dixon reveals, “is to use a field of view greater than 180°”, which has the effect of lifting parts of the landscape that would normally be out of sight below the base of the dome into view, so the horizon fills the dome even behind the audience to create “a feeling of vastness”. The team at the Griffith Observatory says it has found the perfect render management solution in AWS Thinkbox and looks forward to presenting the results at the premiere of Signs of Life in May 2020.
SPACING OUT Griffith Observatory now has a ‘Mini Moon’ to house a render farm for its CG content
dome masters are projected. He explains that, because every square inch of the dome receives light from every other part, “a cross-bounce effect occurs and reduces the contrast of an image so drastically that it appears submerged in a grey fog”. To correct this, Dixon and Yeung take a chiaroscuro approach to compositing shots. Critical elements are immersed in pools of light, and environment and background elements are kept in relative darkness. The 180° fisheye lens can also be problematic. The camera has to be close to an object for it to look big in the dome, but as the camera gets closer to an object
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook