INVESTIGATING THE CLOUD
SERVICES IN ANIMATION FIELD
Dr. LAVANYA RAJENDRAN
Assistant Professor, Department of Media Sciences, CEG, Anna University, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India.
Abstract :
The production of 2D and 3D animated films demands high end systems with massive computing resource. Handling massive computing resources requires high investment in infrastructure and maintenance, which is a major hindrance for the animation industry / animators who want to produce few minutes of film. The cloud services promises to deliver on-demand and scalable computing resources to the animation industry. In this paper, it is proposed to investigate the cloud services in animation. The research is designed in two case studies to analyze the scenarios in both traditional and through the cloud services.
Keywords: multimedia, cloud, graphics and animation.
1. Introduction
Cloud Computing has become increasingly affordable and dynamic scale up and scale down has become practical. Throughout the world, the concept of cloud has made its emergence and it is booming in every area. Major companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have already made most of their data and information already available in the cloud and many IT industries like IBM and TCS are making their foot prints in this field. Many industries are adopting ‘Storage as a Service’ for storing their numerous data and ‘Platform as a Service’ for running their applications.
HP is offering a cloud based music and video services to Touchpad which has not managed yet by Apple (Dixon 2011). Apple is gearing up to launch a cloud based video service, focusing on delivering Video on Demand movies to connected TVs and Blu-ray players, and it is planning to expand the services to PCs by allowing subscribers to watch movies on Web browsers (Donohue et al 2011). The 8×8, Inc., provider of business communications and managed hosting solutions, now offers small and medium businesses (SMB), a set of affordable cloud based video conferencing services through private cloud that enable the organizations to benefit from visual collaboration (Vazquez 2011).
Inspite of the cloud services offered in the IT, medical and various other sectors, the cloud providers have also developed an aspiration for the animation domain which requires lot of computational resources. This is particularly true when it comes to the Computer Graphics (CG) film production and visual effects which require massive amounts of computational resources, typically tens of millions of computing hours, during the normal course of a production. Delivering on-demand and scalable computing resources as a cloud service is a desirable asset in an industry known for ever increasing and variable demand. In addition to it, either for existing or new companies, estimating the cost of infrastructure is a key step towards a quantitative analysis of issues such as ROI (Return on Investment) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements). The organizations, which minimize the total operational cost and maximize the innovative investments, have higher revenue and profitability performance. By providing scalable infrastructure with multimedia computing resources and storage services in the cloud would be both cost effective and faster.
2. Animation Industry
years to complete with the expected and desired quality. For instance, the animation movie Toy Story, took more than three hours to render each frame of the film on a workstation, although using render farm inherent parallelism let Pixar complete all 114,000 frames of the 77-minute film in two years (Dolbier et al 2005).
Thus, for the animation company to create 3D rendering with high quality for its clients, requires large amounts of computing to accomplish the renderings within an acceptable time frame. In addition, it is necessary to get the licensed software which is handy is also little difficult. So to overcome these constraints, the new technology called cloud computing can be used by the animation professionals. During the production and post-production stage of an animation film, it requires a number of sample models for a single character, before it gets approved, each of which requires at least partial rendering. In this research paper, the need of the animation industry is accessed and these extracted set of requirements are itemized.
Graphics that has to be created within a deadline or Animation film that has to be rendered within a time frame requires high processing power
Requirement for infrastructure with huge computing resources
Reduce the incurring cost
Similarly, the new animation companies need to invest on the hardware and the computation resources even before the actual work starts. Only by doing so, the clients will have confidence and the company can also provide them back with the required service.
Traditionally, the required hardware is installed in advance by forecasting the workload and they ensure to invest on the hardware 40 to 60 percentage more than the forecasted need. As the load increases, the capacity is also added ensuring over provisioning. The virtualization helps to decrease the over provisioning, but it has to be done manually by adding the required virtual machines or the physical server. Even by doing so, 20% of the capacity is over-provisioned, which not only increases the initial cost but also increases the maintenance cost. In spite of these high investments, there are chances of unpredictable high growth in the load, which at times is very difficult to handle immediately, thereby causing poor performance in the server. There are also chances that the server might go down. This will surely reduce the client’s trust on the animation company. The other disadvantage with the traditional model is that most of the time, the computing and the hardware capacities are not fully utilized, leading to excessive and needless investments. This hugh investment is a major problem especially with the startup companies. If the animation company utilises the cloud services, the major problems faced by them would be reduced.
3. Cloud Computing for Animation
The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to 1960, when John McCarthy opined that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility". In 1997, the first academic definition was provided by Ramnath K. Chellappa who called it a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits. The term cloud had already come into commercial use in the early 1990s to refer to large Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks.
Loud cloud, founded in 1999 by Marc Andreessen, was one of the first to attempt to commercialize cloud computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model. By the turn of the 21st century, the term "cloud computing" began to appear more widely, although most of the focus at that time was limited to SaaS, called "ASP's" or Application Service Providers, under the terminology of the day.
Amazon Web Services project. In 2009, providers such as Amazon cater to major markets by deploying local infrastructure and allowing customers to select "availability zones.
Cloud Computing in concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.
Cloud is on-demand and is service-oriented. Cloud Computing defines a model where specific services are assigned to systems that are accessed through a network. It is a type of computing in which dynamically scalable and often-virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. It is a promising computing technology because of the inherent value it provides its client in terms of reduced Total Cost Ownership (TCO) and increased Return on Investment (ROI). It provides for increased efficiencies and resiliency in the shape of reduced complexity towards systems management, more efficient workload utilization and optimum application deployment flexibility. It allows customers to develop, deploy and run systems that are highly reliable, scalable and perform extremely well. Key characteristics that distinguish Cloud Computing from other computing methodologies is that the infrastructure itself is programmable. Cloud Architecture supplies an infrastructure that includes functions as Computational resources planning, Dynamic workload balancing and performance monitoring. According to CloudSigma, the new startup companies can be benefitted in the following ways:
Only paying for computing resources it needs right now, even if in the future it will need more
No large upfront investment costs and no long term contractual commitments
Professional integration of multiple locations without expensive software and hardware solutions
Ability to meet rapid growth as it becomes successful.
By adopting the cloud computing services, a start-up company can minimise and/or eliminate the vast majority of up-front costs associated with setting up both its internal and external infrastructure. Not only that but it can achieve a level of integration and sophistication simply not affordable or achievable using traditional solutions. The cloud based solution also benefits from ‘baked-in’ flexibility and scalability allowing the company to grow fast without debilitating up-front hardware costs and to keep its competitive advantage over larger competitors, namely speed. Rapidly deploying new solutions and scaling them as and when required is one of the key advantages that a small nimble start-up has and should look to retain
4. Case Studies
Animation Studios also found that its character rendering and modeling processes were putting increasingly heavy demands on its data storage infrastructure. Needing to store and retrieve extremely large files at high speed, and looking for a cost-effective solution that could handle exceptional growth is a challenge.
To handle this, DreamWorks Studios signed a multi-year contract with cloud computing provider Cerelink. This will allow DreamWorks to render computer animated films using elastic Cerelink computing resources housed in their facilities at the New Mexico Applications Center (NMCAC) [6]. Having the ability to quickly scale compute needs to meet DreamWorks Animation’s high-quality production demands, Cerelink using its private computer cloud rendered the studio’s latest 3D movies ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and ‘Shrek’ (Butler 2010).
The case study represented describes the efficiency of cloud services embraced by the animation industry and which are used for the rendering process of the 3D animation film. Expert Interview from Ms. Ranjana of Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), was recorded. According to her, the CRL offered services to Crest Animation Studio by providing the necessary infrastructure (IaaS) that helps drive the rendering initiatives to the next level of the new animation project.
‘EKA’ the Sanskrit name for number one, is a supercomputer developed by Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) is rated as the fourth fastest supercomputer in Asia at the time of release around the world. It took about $30 million to build this supercomputer. It also has 1794 computing nodes and is powered to perform about 133 trillion sustained calculations per second. ‘EKA’ is coupled with unique on-demand business models and a cloud based remote access mechanism. It also uses interconnect based on Projective Geometry concepts.
The ‘EKA’ supercomputer has a peek performance of 170 Teraflops and 120 Teraflops according to the LINPACK benchmarks which is a world standard for supercomputers based on performance. The one unique thing about ‘EKA’ is the ‘checkpointing’ which is a simple solution to save the state of the entire application every 15 minutes at the present node while the supercomputer is still performing. The checkpointing is highly beneficial since in earlier supercomputers thousands of nodes are involved and any fault in one particular node results in the start of the project again as a fresh.
For example, while rendering an animation film using the earlier supercomputers and when an error at one node is been encountered in the middle or at the end of the rendering process will result in a permanent halt of the rendering process. One has to start it again from the beginning for rendering the animation movie. This is not the case with ‘EKA’ supercomputer with its checkpointing which allows saving the rendering process every 15 minutes at the present node until it has progressed making it easier even when an error occurs. The rendering process of the animation film can be continued later from the node where the error has occurred by saving the time of the whole rendering process.
This method of rendering the animation films is more effective and efficient by reducing the time and cost than the traditional rendering machines which take years of rendering time. So, cloud technologies is more efficient since an animation film of about 30 minutes in length and 25 frames per second would contain a total of about 45,000 frames which can be rendered using high end servers based on high performance computing.
By this way, rendering time per frame was also reduced by about 50% without a loss in the quality of the final output. This compute intensive process is very time consuming that the film ‘Alpha and Omega’ rendered using ‘EKA’ supercomputer is completed in two and a half years as against four years for any other animation films. The storage space for the rendered output can be stored in the cloud eliminating the need to have large data storage space. The storage of ‘EKA’ is 80 Terabytes with 5.2 GB per second throughput. The chief benefits of using cloud technologies is that it offers on-demand high bandwidth links for data transfers, ownership model while not worrying about the capital investments, physical and network security and speedy rendering with flexible payment options.
The 3D rendering is also be done by using the cloud services provided by “Aneka” that runs files as if running on the cloud. The tool called design explorer is used in implementing the 3D rendering service provided with Aneka. The raw designs of the prototypes are required to be rendered to high quality 3D images using the Autodesk rendering software called Maya. By examining the 3D images, engineers are able to identify any potential problems from the original design and make the appropriate changes. The creation of a design suitable for mass production can take many months or even years. The rendering of three dimensional models is one of the phases that absorb a significant amount of time since the 3D model of the train has to be rendered from different points of views and for many frames. A single frame with one camera angle defined can take up to 2 minutes to render the image. The rendering of a complete set of images from one design require three days. Moreover, this process has to be repeated every time a change is applied to the model. In order to face this problem, a private Aneka Cloud has been set up and it is found that, by simply using a private cloud infrastructure that harnessed on demand the spare cycles of 30 desktop machines in the department, the rendering process has been reduced from days to few hours (Vecchiola 2009).
5. Conclusion
Major companies are making their foot prints in the field by adopting the required cloud service. But still, there are few fields like animation industry are still in a budding phase in Chennai. The animation industry has to be given awareness and training on how to implement the rendering and other services in cloud. Thereby the industries can identify the required services (Infrastructure as a Services, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, STorage as a Service) from the cloud and try to deploy it either in public, private, community or hybrid cloud.
Reference
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