Rendering Shaders & Distributed Rendering Architecture with Technical Frequently Asked Questions

Following frequently asked questions, about MAYA Architecture and how to take advantage of available software extension for digital post production environment, GVS delivers the hardware with multiple deferent host system from G5, AMD and Intel to achieve extreme creative freedom

Render Manager and Network Distributor Smedge:
Smedge is a very popular multi-function render manager and network distributor. Handling renders for Maya®, mental ray®, Turtle, and Renderman, in addition to several other 3D applications and compositors, Smedge is easy-to-use and artist friendly, as well as simple to administer and scalable.
With a large client base of small boutiques to full scale post houses and large effects companies, Smedge offers artists a friendly graphical interface for distributing all their rendering and compositing needs.
www.uberware.net/smedge2/

Maya Harware Accerater PURE:
EPURE, ART's new product line is a revolutionary PCI 3D ray traced rendering board for graphics workstations. With a rendering speed of 12X over software-basedray tracing, the simple, easy to use RenderPipe interfaces, and its low cost, PURE is the most efficient high quality 3D rendering solution available. PURE is based around an array of eight of ART¿s unique AR350 ray tracing graphics processors. The AR350 is the only 3D chip capable of accelerating the complex, physically based ray traced rendering algorithm. Each AR350 features a geometry co-processor for performing ray/triangle intersection calculations and an end-user-programmable shading co-processor for performing highly flexible shading and lighting calculations. With eight AR350 chips, the PURE P1800 is capable of performing over 1.1 Billion ray/triangle intersection tests each second.
www.artvps.com/comparisons.ihtml
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Dosch HDRI for Maya ?
The product contains Maya 5 optimized versions of the following Dosch HDRI products:
Chrome and Studio Effects
High Dynamic Range Images¿or HDRI for short¿are the lighting technology for truly realistic 3D-Design. The extra illumination info from a scene, which is wrapped into the HDRI-surround image, gives radiosity a degree of realism so far reserved for Hollywood.
The product offers a high-quality and comprehensive library of 150 HDRI effects for direct use in high-end 3D design and animation applications. This technology saves time on the elaborate manual definition of multiple light sources and also from lengthy experimenting with color choice and light volume. The HDRIs also contain the information about whether there is a direct light source (e.g. sun, spot light) with defined shadow, or a cloudy sky/neon lights with diffuse light and "soft" shadows.
All HDRIs are license-free and can therefore be used without any additional cost in all commercial productions.
Extreme Hi-Res
Twenty-four high resolution HDRIs of a diverse selection of buildings, structures, interiors are the lighting technology for truly realistic positioning of 3D-objects with authentic reflections, shadows etc.
www.doschdesign.com/e_product

Rush™ Network Render Queue ?
The Rush Render Queue is a priority based, distributed network render queue that can manage and distribute processing of command line based tools such as compositors and renderers on small and large networks. Multiple platforms are supported including Windows®, Linux®, Mac® OSX and IRIX®. Supports multiple rendering and compositing packages including Maya®. Rush is currently used in production on networks with over 500 hosts.
Rush will interest both intermediate and power users; the Graphic User Interface allows simple management of distributed rendering, while technically savvy power users can exploit the command line interface by creating 'wrapper scripts' or custom guis to dovetail rush into existing production pipelines. .
www.seriss.com/rush

EnFuzion is an multi-platform, multi-application render farm management solution ?
Designed to handle millions of jobs and hundreds of machines, EnFuzion is ideally suited for large Maya(r) render farms. Combining high performance with extraordinary ease of use, EnFuzion is the perfect render farm solution for new and expert users.
Key benefits of EnFuzion for Maya render farms are:
Full Integration - Fully integrated with Maya, EnFuzion distributed rendering functions can be accessed from the standard Maya user interface.
Scalable - Low-overhead job scheduler guarantees high performance for large render farms with hundreds of machines.
Multi-application - Simple interface supports multiple rendering packages and applications.
Multi-platform - Support all major operating systems and hardware platforms, including the 64-bit, multi-core and hyperthreading hardware platforms.
Heterogeneous - EnFuzion supports render farms with mixed hardware/OS configurations.
Easy to Manage - Extensive job scheduling features and administrative tools give administrators complete control and visibility to jobs and machines on the render farm.
Web Interface - Intuitive web interface for control and monitoring functions.
www.axceleon/product

Distributed rendering management Muster?
Muster, a cross-platform distributed renderings management system provides artists with the ability to manage very complex rendering tasks in record breaking times, using all of the available OS present in your render-farm, even the new engines for Mac OS X, Linux, and IRIX.
All is controlled from NT4/2000 server and self-distributable remote-consoles. Pause jobs, change their priority, their load on the farm, manage the render farm, kill and pause each individual CPU and job¿s packet, send Maya jobs, cloth caching and image cut jobs. All of this is available using Virtual Vertex Muster. .
www.vertex.com

Projective rendering system for mental ray MicroWave?
MicroWave is a projective rendering™ system for Maya® and mental ray®. This product turns anything you can render, into real-time 3D content regardless of the scene complexity, or shading features applied. Zero render-times and maximum efficiency, photo-realism, and extremely detailed textures are the major benefits of this powerful system.
MicroWave, built into one of the industry's leading renderers is a must for every highend pipeline, targeted at real-time content creators especially. Reliability, speed, accuracy, above all the enormous flexibility makes it a truly powerful production tool. Already at the time of its official release, MicroWave became a part of several cutting-edge productions, including:
Nikopol - movie trilogy (Duran Duboi), Unreal Tournament 2003 (Epic & Digital Extremes), Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon (Revolution Software), Serious Sam 3 (CroTeam) and counting.
www.evasion.com/product

What Open GL cards does After Effects 6.5 support?
For a complete list of the Open GL cards supported please visit www.gvs9000.com/nvidia.html. , www.gvs9000.com/ati-radeon.html and www.gvs9000.com/agpgrcaop.html

Real-time visualization and rendering software for better and faster design Opus?
Opticore Opus Realizer™ is a powerful visualization software developed to meet the specific requirements of industrial designers. The objective is to reduce the number of physical prototypes and shorten time to market. Real-time visualization combined with high visual quality makes it the ideal tool for industrial designers and management. Imports Alias wire files.
Opticore Opus Studio™ is targeted towards designers and engineers within the industrial product development process. It provides all functionality for evaluation of virtual products in real-time, using the latest visualization technology. Various formats of CAD data are imported in a matter of minutes.
www.Opticore.com

Enterprise-class Rendering Distributed management system Qube?
qube! Remote Control, developed by Pipelinefx, is an enterprise-class renderfarm management system designed to handle both large and small renderfarms. Our patent¿pending software incorporates state¿of¿the¿art techniques for batch queuing, process control, and renderfarm management to maximize production throughput and tighten the iterative loop in today¿s demanding motion picture, video, and game production schedules.
At the heart of the qube! Remote Control™ Renderfarm Management System is a multi¿threaded supervisor with the ability to manage hundreds of thousands of jobs simultaneously. Pipelinefx engineered this powerful supervisor to scale to any environment, ranging from the small shop to a vast corporate studio. The supervisor¿s unique event¿driven architecture ensures lightning¿fast responses to user commands and immediate job execution.
qube! includes full API support for such popular languages as C++, Perl, Python, and MEL which gives you the ability to craft custom submission and execution applications, link multiple tasks into sophisticated job dependency relations, and break work down not just into frames, but into any sequence of data. Submit any command or executable, and qube! will run it. Setuid execution under Linux and automatic drive mapping in Windows recreates the user¿s environment on any execution host. Any job that can be broken down into subtasks will run on all available CPUs. The supervisor determines the most efficient distribution of frames, thus minimizing idle workers.
Virtually any aspect of a job can be modified after submission. Add more CPUs without needing to altering the job. Our built in frame server eliminates the need to "chunk" or "partition" jobs before submission.
www.Qube.com/product

Turtle for Maya is a radically fast renderer for complex scenes with advanced lighting Turtle?
Turtle for Maya is a radically fast renderer for complex scenes with advanced lighting. If you use raytracing and Global Illumination on large models - you will want to use Turtle for Maya.
How fast is Turtle for Maya?
Turtle users in animation, automotive, industrial design, architectural visualization and computer game industries that so far have been using cutting-edge industrial rendering software have seen some of their previous rendering times cut in half when using Turtle for Maya. Turtle for Maya also allows users to preview renderings with full raytracing and Global Illumination, and to render larger models in Maya than what has previously been possible.
Product Specification
Turtle is completely integrated with Maya, and is accessed through the Maya graphical user interface. Turtle can render both internally in Maya and externally as a standalone application. For complete updated feature list go to
www.illuminatelabs.com

Extreme depth-of-field simulation for mental ray X-Dof?
X-Dof is an expert depth-of-field solution, production proven, and fully optimized for high-end CG creation. The simulation features a complex bokeh rendition, running at an unmatched speed and providing coherent output even under the most extreme conditions.
The system provides a fully photographic approach to the depth-of-field range calculation. Driven by real lens parameters such as focal distance, f-stop and lens-focal-length, it allows for an ultimate photo-real rendering and perfect live camera matching.
Compliant with the mental ray® 3.x standard, the product can be seamlessly integrated into the Maya® and/or the mental ray® standalone environment, fully supporting the host workflow and functionality, including interactive rendering.
www.evasion3d.com/product

Would GVS provide network and integration suport for the rendering farm?
GVS stinght in network and storage destitution, can provide you with Complite moultiple platform hardware and software suport focus toured the most cost effective and stable rendering farm design, with highest true put.

Who should I contact if I have questions?
In North America, contact customer services at 415-777-0320.