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by Sephiroth87 2154 days ago
My partner works in VFX, and watching them work during quarantine, the experience was poor to say the least (aside from the speed from which they went from "remote work is not even an option", to it working).

This seems like a good step forward, but I think the real potential is in building the frontend software to be as lightweight as possible, to run on any computer, and just put the previews rendering on the cloud (so for example, instead of wasting bandwidth streaming ui elements / desktop interface you could just send actual useful data)

Edit: another good point of this model, is that for example, occasionally workstations turn off / stop responding / etc.. I don't have much IT experience and know how much you can mitigate that, but they had to often had someone still on premise to fix things. Going completely cloud based would be much more "quarantine" friendly in that regard...
1 comments
dynamite-ready 2154 days ago
That's an interesting idea. I originally wanted to post about how cool the virtual CGI workstation concept was, but what might be better still, is a system / platform where an artist can do as much as they can on their local machine, and outsource requests for preview / final renders to cloud based machines, while streaming the result back to the enduser, with some amount of lag when moving cameras around a preview.

Wouldn't want any amount of lag in the modelling process though. Even disk pauses and garbage collection can prove distracting with that kind of work.

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Sephiroth87 2154 days ago
Yeah, for the 3d side of things it gets a bit trickier, vs 2d (compositing, grading, etc) where the interface itself could trivially run on anything, and you just need rendered video frames.

But even for 3d I would thing a "streaming based" 3d protocol or something would be much better than just an RDP connection

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Const-me 2154 days ago
RDP connection already does all that. Essentially, it connects client PC's GPU to server's CPU. The software running on the server ain't aware, it calls regular D3D11 APIs and they just work, except for rare edge cases when it doesn't.
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