Special effects: Building dreams in Sci-Fi

The Wandering Earth tells a tale of humans in the distant future fleeing earth upon the destruction of the sun. Director Frant Gwo famously imposed extremely high requirements on the special effects used in this movie.

Gwo wanted to truly dazzle the audience with fantastical scenes from the future, set in a stunning starry galaxy. He wanted to depict everything from the chaos of a flooded and frozen Shanghai, to visions of extreme climate change, to shots of the earth orbiting Jupiter.

Macrograph, a Korean special effects company involved with the production of major blockbusters such as Operation Red Sea and Mermaid, was invited by Chinese partner MOREVFX to join them in taking on the epic dream-building project that was Gwo's The Wandering Earth. Macrograph agreed to provide over 120 artists to spend nine months completing the special effects for six major scenes in the movie, involving nearly 500 highly-complex moves.

Macrograph's CEO Lee In-ho stated that the details of many project models meant the capabilities required were well beyond everyone's initial expectations.

Typically when making a film, it takes half an hour to render a single frame for a standard special effect. There are at least 24 frames per second, which means that rendering a whole film would take several years using only the rendering facilities of the special effects company.

Macrograph didn't have years to spare. The solution? Cloud rendering.

Cloud rendering: A technological revolution for special effect production

Cloud rendering makes massive computing power available at elastic capacity, providing a perfect solution for rendering production. The special effects company simply uploads the files to the cloud, operates the cloud computing system remotely to perform rendering, and then downloads the rendered materials to the local computer at the end of the process. This means that cloud rendering can be used no matter where the special effects coordinator is located.

In addition, cloud rendering can divide a task into several parts and spread the load across all nodes in the cluster simultaneously. This greatly reduces rendering time, and can help manage rendering sequence and monitor progress as required.

HUAWEI CLOUD: Supporting the special effects industry.

To improve rendering efficiency and reduce costs, Macrograph started looking for a cloud service provider. Macrograph decided on HUAWEI CLOUD for its professional technologies and high-quality services.

HUAWEI CLOUD has almost infinite CPU resources and offers high-volume storage and a fast network environment. Capacity can quickly be expanded to 1,000 nodes, and the number of VMs can be quickly increased or reduced based on the workload. Special effects companies can adjust the number of nodes based on their rendering requirements to ensure optimal efficiency.

To put things into perspective, a rendering workload requiring 100 physical machines working for 10 hours can be completed in just one hour with 1,000 VMs.

HUAWEI CLOUD helped Macrograph complete rendering in a fraction of the usual time, saving a huge amount of manpower and material costs. The massive computing capabilities and elastic usage model can effectively reduce enterprises' idle resources, storage space, and depreciation costs.

Together, HUAWEI CLOUD's massive computing capabilities and the Macrograph's self-developed cloud rendering service software Queenbee provide a secure, stable, and high-speed rendering environment for technical staff. Queenbee can automatically analyze scenarios so that producers with little experience in the technical field can easily perform rendering directly on HUAWEI CLOUD.

Generally, implementing rendering on the cloud requires multiple steps: allocating servers, installing 3D programs and plug-ins, collecting files one by one, transmitting files, rendering files, and receiving results. This is the architecture that must be experienced throughout the whole rendering process. Queenbee massively simplifies this series of steps into an almost fully automatic process, and implements real-time monitoring and management by a frame or task, providing users with a very convenient UI.

Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD and Queenbee not only use this platform within Macrograph for special effect production, but have also started providing the service externally. This enables other design companies, such as CG and VFX, to benefit from convenient and efficient special effect production services on the cloud.

HUAWEI CLOUD grows in tandem with the Chinese special effects industry

Compared with leasing or purchasing physical machines, HUAWEI CLOUD's on-demand resources and pay-per-use charging mode enable special effect companies to easily achieve cost-effective and efficient project operations.

Lee In-ho said that Macrograph would like to work with HUAWEI CLOUD to share and use special effect assets on the cloud in the future. This requires solving some technical problems in the short term, and also requires adjustments to processes and methods involved with special effects production in the long term. Macrograph hopes not just to improve productivity through saving costs, but also to optimize productivity by improving processes.

HUAWEI CLOUD and Macrograph believe that the future of efficient special effects production is in the cloud.

At present, HUAWEI CLOUD's mature rendering solution is used not just for film and video, but also in special effects and related production for animation, video games, and even interior design.

Although the adoption of cloud technology is currently limited to the rendering process, the aim is to move all processes involved in special effects production onto the cloud within the short term.

Once that happens, cloud technology will become the cornerstone of the special effects industry. All technical staff, assets, and hardware devices around the world will be able to connect and interact with each other through the cloud platform. This will be one of the biggest changes ever witnessed in the special effects industry; indeed, it will be a truly revolutionary one.