Marc Dole
Owner/editor/compositor
Hatchling Studios
Portsmouth, NH www.hatchling.com
LIST: Starting at $750
Why I Love It: You never know how much you need something until you
don’t have it anymore. Well, we were not about to let Royal Render go.
Our studio has ten animation stations running a mix of Softimage,
Lightwave, Digital Fusion and After Effects. Connected to that we have
30 dedicated render boxes, so at night we run 40 render nodes.
"Each piece of software we use comes with its own render manager; some,
of course, better than others and really manageable if that’s all you
need it to be. Since we work on multiple projects at multiple stages we
used to spend a lot of time setting up which machines get to use the
render farm. We only have eight-to-ten render licenses for our main
packages (Lightwave has a free render so it’s on everything) and we
always fight over the faster machines with more RAM getting priority.
This caused a lot of wasted time. We installed the basic level of royal
render that allowed us to manage the ten fast blades just to run XSI
and saw how easy it was to control and the feedback that we got on the
screen allowed the animators, compositors and production managers to
see where each shot was in the render queue. We could see stills and
even a thumbnail animation preview. We decided to dive in and buy the
other modules that lets us control unlimited machines and packages.
It’s helped our production process flow much quicker and has taken many
of the repetitive human tasks away from the artists. We now have more
time to animate and rent the farm out with little effort."
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