Abstract: film animation, special effects production and other industries have increased demand for rendering. 4K/6K and various high resolutions will gradually become the mainstream, and local computing power and storage resources can no longer meet the existing tasks. With the evolution of the general environment, the development of the CG industry has entered the fast lane of development. Jin Wei, CEO of Zanqi Technology, shared with you how the CG industry promotes services in cloud production and rendering.
This article is shared from the HUAWEI cloud community " TOP-level CG industry cloud rendering service evolution path ", the original author: audio and video butler.
The demand for rendering in industries such as film and television animation and special effects production has increased. 4K/6K and various high resolutions will gradually become the mainstream, and local computing power and storage resources can no longer meet the existing tasks. With the evolution of the general environment, the development of the CG industry has entered the fast lane of development. Jin Wei, CEO of Zanqi Technology, shared with you how the CG industry promotes services in cloud production and rendering.
01 Zanqi Technology
You may be relatively unfamiliar with Zanqi Technology. Zanqi Technology was established in 2010, headquartered in Changzhou, Jiangsu, and has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and other places. At present, there are more than 360,000 users nationwide, most of them are corporate users, and some of them are individual users. They choose Zanqi products for cloud production, rendering, and transmission. Our mission is to "create an ecosystem of the visual industry and allow cloud computing to bring infinite possibilities for creation". With "cloud rendering tools" as the carrier, we provide overall solutions and services for cloud rendering for multiple industries. One of Zanqi's products, "Rendering Cloud", is a SaaS that uses public clouds for rendering and production.
The products of Zanqi Technology are divided into: renderings, architectural design, film and television animation, Doll Cloud Desktop, and CGMAGIC plug-ins. Among them, Drifting Cat is still being polished. It is expected to meet with users in the industry in the second half of this year. I heard the teacher say that high-end equipment on the cloud can do some better production and production, and Drifting Cat is a cloud desktop built entirely based on GPUs. , Using Nvidia's RTX series, the configuration will be higher than 2080, 3080. Provide convenient services to creators and applicable people in a more flexible and casual way.
The scenarios and industries targeted by our four products are roughly as shown in the figure above. At present, the full-scene cooperation has provided solutions, which can be bought on Zanqi’s own website or on the Huawei cloud market. At the same time, it is also actively cooperating with Huawei to promote self-operation in the strictly selected market. In Huawei's own product system, Zanqi's full range of products can also be purchased.
The above are the qualifications and honors of Zanqi Technology. We are a strategic partner of Huawei Cloud and a core partner of NVIDIA. Products from PaaS to SaaS are self-developed.
Simply put, Zanqi Technology is an Internet company integrating PaaS and SaaS, which is deeply involved in vertical industries and serves the CG industry.
The above picture is a flowchart. The product manages scheduling through the Zanqi PaaS layer, and the ports of the SaaS layer, and finally enters the cloud computing public cloud platform. In one sentence, all users can enjoy the computing power and convenience brought by the public cloud as well as various solutions and services through our products for the first time. This is still very different from traditionally going to the cloud or sending a set of private environments locally. Everyone knows that with the increasing demand for computing power, we are doing access to the video and CG industries, and the requirements for solutions are getting higher and higher. Many locals cannot meet the needs. At this time, public cloud is the best solution. Program. Zanqi's SaaS service from the client to the last mile of the public cloud is very convenient and convenient.
So why did you choose to be based on the public cloud? In fact, Zanqi first used a private cloud. After purchasing 3,000 servers, he finally found that there was still a problem. First of all, no matter how many servers you buy, it cannot effectively guarantee the various needs of various users. When we migrate all the environments to public clouds, the operation and maintenance becomes lighter, and the ability to accept projects is more flexible. At the same time, technical capabilities have also received a lot of empowerment and support from public clouds. This is what we used to use private clouds before. Unreachable. To sum up, the use of public clouds enables the highest increase in computing power and security, especially the current cooperation with Huawei and some cloud cooperation, which can basically meet the needs of most domestic users. At present, many of Tencent and Ali are our users. For example, the CG animation content of King's Glory and Peace Elite Studio are all products of Xingyun. Storage, network, operation and maintenance, cost, management, and timeliness are all that we have found after using it. The best way in the entire rendering environment process is to complete the output and solve through the bottom layer of the public cloud.
Zanqi is also actively promoting the entry of the entire CG industry into the public cloud ecosystem. For these pieces, the bottom layer is our public cloud, and the PaaS layer in the middle is our self-developed, named Scorpio architecture, and provides these components as shown in the figure above. The SaaS layer is about computing power, collaboration, software, rendering, plug-ins to the network disk and process management software. Provide SaaS circle entrance for all kinds of people among our designers. In fact, these parts can quickly use various products of Zanqi through SaaS, and at the same time land to the lowest laas layer faster, using the computing power and storage of the laas layer for daily work use. This set is all built on the public cloud, and the company probably places no more than ten servers. Zanqi currently has nearly 60 employees in its own R&D team. The servers are also deployed on the cloud, and the cloud environment is used for testing and writing.
02 Rendering Cloud Platform
Zanqi's rendering is the rendering cloud platform. We provide stable PaaS services, convenient SaaS services, and various manual services for the entire industry. At present, the brand of Xuanyun supports various software commonly used in the entire CG industry. It has made more than 1500 plug-ins, which can be easily and quickly provided to artists and designers to use the cloud, and the price is very high. Our products went out of the country for the first time last year, and cooperated with Huawei to build an overseas farm in Singapore to officially provide services to Southeast Asia and some European customers. The feedback received so far is very good, saying that the quality of our Chinese products is reliable and the price-performance ratio is relatively good. This is all due to the support and help of the public cloud for domestic SaaS.
Xuanyun has also been using Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and basically it has a fairly high lead in this area. If we are in a private cloud environment, it is difficult to use the latest Intel technology, and in rendering this scene, the composition of the chip technology directly affects the performance and cost-effectiveness. We are also honored to have maintained a good cooperation with Intel and, together with Huawei Cloud, are currently the best in the industry in terms of memory, cooperation, I/O performance and security. For example, when we make special movies in some scenes, we can provide a single machine with a core CPU of more than 200 cores and a memory of 1TB. This is rare in the current environment, and it also makes up for the vacancy in our industry. There are only some equipment that the public cloud can provide.
At present, Render Cloud provides some rendering services for more than 100,000 architectural design industries in China, including architectural animation, interior decoration, garden landscape and so on.
The above are as film and animation projects. Every year, we have more than dozens of films, series and animations that are brought to thousands of consumers through cloud rendering products. Including this year's Lunar New Year files, there are a total of 7 Lunar New Year videos, and 3 of them have chosen Xuanyun products.
03 Insight into the rendering industry
In terms of the development status of the rendering industry, from the perspective of the entire digital content, including digital upgrades that cover more digital assets, the demand for rendering is increasing. Whether it is pre-rendering or real-time rendering, the status quo varies from 2K, 3K to 4K, 6K, recently we have received many projects and 8K to 16K. This kind of high-resolution works that we want to do has gradually increased. Local computing power, hardware and software are difficult to meet and guarantee timeliness, including rendering projects mostly without standards, because the level of technical personnel is different, and the requirements of Party A are different, our products are basically diverse. Except in some schools and training courses, it may be more standard. After we enter the society, we will have a lot of non-standard scenes.
In the future, with the development and changes of the general environment, we predict that the entire CG industry will get 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. SaaS vendors like us will also provide more and more services vertically. Including future requirements for software and hardware, storage, and transmission resources will also be higher.
During the epidemic, it also reflected the increase in the number of people working together in multiple locations, which has a relatively large impact on our industry. For example, some companies have hierarchies. Normal employees work together in the office, but suddenly they find that they can’t go to the office and all work is stopped. Although the phone and email are connected, they cannot get the same data and data. Assets mean that all projects are stopped. This also puts forward new requirements for our industry, and we will continue to propose new products to solve the problem of multi-person and multi-site collaborative office.
There is also an increase in the demand for customized scenarios. For example, our customer Ali needs to customize its own scenarios, so we have to match Ali's process and work requirements. Whether it is an Internet company, a game company or a video company, there will be demands in this regard. This will be a trend in the future, and Zanqi's products will be well served and constructed.
In terms of movies, we watch "Avatar", based on a frame of 2 hours, a server needs more than 300 years of work to complete the rendering work. Assuming no matter how large its computing power is and how its time is compressed, in fact its time will still be longer. Looking at a movie "Alita" in the previous two years, as far as I know, the rendering cost of this film exceeded 100 million yuan, and the final rendering was done in New Zealand. The company built a set of rendering farms in the local area. When the film was finished, the local meteorological department did a test. During the rendering, the temperature in the entire town was 2 degrees higher than the temperature in previous years, which was caused by the server emissions. Heat. Looking at this kind of special effects blockbuster now, if you don't need to go to the cloud, you can't do it in China. Although there is such a technology, such a price and duration are unacceptable, and the audience can't wait.
In the future, including what Xuanyun is doing now, we provide large ultra-high-performance storage, first of all, there is no problem in transmission, and tens of thousands of servers are concurrent to meet the needs of customer customization. The scenario we often encounter now is that the customer asks "Can it be completed in 30 minutes with a thousand servers", and we can adjust it to 2000 servers in 10 minutes. This is the current cloud market in China, and we have the ability to provide it to customers at any time and at a cost-effective price.
For filmmakers, the motion is the concurrency of 3000 to 5000 servers. Most of the CPUs are 32 or 64, and the memory is 128 or greater. Just start running, and the storage is generally from 50 to 100 TB. We can all be satisfied, and at the same time we can support the concurrency of at least 10 movies. Thanks to these, it is not how good products we have, but that our country is in such a good era. Our country has such a good infrastructure, and there are so many good cloud vendors that provide us with such good products. service. So I think that having so much strong support is also the luck of our generation of practitioners. If you push it forward for 5 years or 10 years, it is unthinkable. It used to be done in small workshops, and the level and efficiency were very low.
04 Future Development Plan
In the future, the standard we are pursuing is still the full range of TD support and services. We will give away all technologies other than rendering. At present, we are also undertaking many overseas projects. In fact, our domestic film and television CG industry is not bad. Some of "Harry Potter 7" and "Transformers 5" are made in China. In the beginning, Hollywood blockbusters will not leave Hollywood, but gradually they believe in the level and ability of the Chinese, so more and more top Hollywood films are produced by Chinese studios. Including the past few years, Chinese games have also gone to the world. The original authors are all our Chinese companies, and we will all do this. In terms of computing power and storage, we will continue to ensure that the next coordination and transmission are also some of the advantages of us and the public cloud.
Let’s briefly talk about the products that we have not yet launched. The name is easier to remember as Dumbled Cat. The English version is Demo, which can help our users to make samples anytime, anywhere. Why is it the most applicable desktop cloud solution? Because it is the industry's first 100% GPU-based, each of its desktop cloud backends are GPUs, which can only be said to be a single card or a half card. The performance of a half card is approximately equal to 2060, which may be a little higher, and the video memory is extremely large, with a single card of 24 megabytes. The application scenarios are cloud design, collaborative office, asset sharing, etc. At the same time, this cloud desktop is also teamed up with Huawei and Nvidia, and has been authorized by Nvidia.
If our group's partners have requirements for remote collaborative office, cloud storage, software use, and one-click deployment, all of them can be used. The software is not yet on the market, but some customers are using it, for example, in the field of synthesis in the film and television industry. The synthesis of some special films requires powerful computing power and resources. At present, the relatively large special film manufacturers in Beijing and Shenzhen are already using Drifting Cats. It's just that our current deployment capabilities are limited and we are still making progress. It is expected that it will be officially commercialized in Q3 this year. Those interested can download and try it. This product is not expensive. We used to buy a supercomputer workstation that cost tens of thousands, and the larger one would cost hundreds of thousands. The emergence of this cloud desktop became flexible, and it was charged by the hour, and it was turned on when it was used. Release it when the time comes. This is a scene of the future brought by the cloud desktop.
This is also a direction for the entire design process in the future, including XDEMOER, XTRACK, XRENDER and so on. 14
Nowadays, more and more large-scale data production and production choose to purchase SaaS software, and use the bottom layer of the cloud to complete the whole process, which has become a trend one after another. In fact, it was relatively difficult for us to push it in the early days, and we did not trust the public cloud, but we have come over these years and we think that the public cloud will become the master in the future.
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