[flipper]

Would cloud farms be practical if your assets lived on the cloud as well? That could solve the bandwidth problem both with the render cycle and collaboration with other shops.

Or would getting the assets there in the first place be impractical?

[napierzaza]

You're off the rails. If two things are "in the cloud" that can still mean they're in different data centers in opposite ends of the earth. The "cloud" just means outside your local lan. So it's the 99.999999...% of the internet you don't have any control of.

Meaning you'd still have bottle necks and bandwidth issues in getting them somewhere. That's why large projects just send HDDs.

This is just a proof of concept.

[cma]

Just have creation tools that allow you to capture and replay input. Then to send that multi-gig mesh or texture, you just send the input events from the artist and replay it in another instance of that tool (think doom2 demo file; as a YouTube video it is hundreds of megs, as a demo file it is a few kb).

[Tamerlin]

There's no way that would be at all productive. It's not like the only thing that the artist is doing is typing characters on a screen. There's also a lot more going on than just echoing pixels like in an IDE.

For a character animator, there's an IK rig which, depending on the character, can be quite complicated, and IK involves a lot of math. Then there's the mesh deformation and blended IK/FK. And then things like hair and cloth simulation. And texture rendering. Doing that on a cloud would have latencies that would make it excruciating to work with.

Compositing would be just as bad; the amount of data involved is larger, and as you add layers and masks, filters that affect those layers and masks, you can pretty much throw any hope of interactivity out the window. Now imagine trying to paint out safety wires over a cloud...

Digital art requires a LOT more computing power than creating software.

Try playing a first person shooter on a laggy network, you'll get a sense for how frustrating and counter-productive what you're suggesting would end up being, though I suspect that it's because you're vastly underestimating how much goes on in digital artists' tools more than anything else.

[cma]

It was claimed that assets couldn't be sent to the cloud because they use too much bandwidth. I pointed out that sending a replay of events used to create assets takes very little bandwidth. This has nothing to do with the latency you are talking about here.

[Encosia]

I think he's implying that the bottleneck won't be an issue if (when?) we eventually have web-based software powerful enough to create those assets entirely within the same "cloud" that would eventually scale out to do the rendering.

[mweatherill]

When things are in the cloud, they don't have to be in different data centers. Cloud providers are starting to provide tools that give you control over proximity for exactly these sorts of performance issues.