Cloud rendering is the latest buzz word in advanced technology segment. Check out why Fox Renderfarm is dominant player in Media and Entertainment sector.

Shenzhen Rayvision Technology Co., Ltd. (Rayvision) focuses in the arena of cluster rendering for the visual cloud computing industry. The company provides online cloud rendering services to clients such as Oscar award winning films, heavy visual effects based TV series, commercials and VR based products. Rayvision is a global strategic partner of Alibaba Cloud.

Known as China’s “Self-Service Cloud Render Farm”, Rayvision is Asia’s largest cloud render farm. Their flagship commercial render farms are Renderbus (domestic cloud render farm service) and Fox Renderfarm (overseas cloud render farm service). Both are specialized products in arena of online cloud computing rendering for Media & Entertainment industry from long time.

With another two products in line: VIVUE.io which is an efficient platform for video review & collaboration, and RaySync which is the industry leading high-speed transmission solution, Rayvision could help improve the work efficiency and inspire the unlimited imagination and creativity for production teams!

Excerpts of our interview with Mr. Mike Zheng, Marketing Director are as follows.

Hi Mike, welcome to our Animation and VFX blog. How Rayvision became one of the early adapters and leader in the field of cloud rendering service?

In early days, Rayvision started its business as an architectural visualization studio with the aim of bringing our clients’ designs, concepts and visions to life. With the fast growing pace of this industry, Rayvision saw a great opportunity in 3D rendering business. At the right time and right opportunity, in 2009, Rayvision started its cloud rendering farm service.

Pioneering the world’s premier self-service online cloud render farm, Renderbus and Fox Renderfarm are the leading commercial render farms in the world. Throughout the years, Rayvision has over 70,000 customers worldwide and have won unanimous praise from 3D Animation, VFX and other Media & Entertainment sectors and also obtained several intellectual property patents through continuous R&D on developing our render platform.

I am very much happy to share the news that Rayvision has recently been awarded “China Cloud Rendering Platform Leading Enterprise Award” & “International Market Development Award” for its success in providing high-quality cloud rendering services.

Who are core team members and their roles/responsibilities behind creating such mammoth self-service cloud render farm?

We have many outstanding and awesome team members right here at Rayvision. The most influential and important core team members are Mr. Kenny Zou (General Manager) and Mr. Ben Cheung (Vice President). Kenny and Ben, both plays an important role in making Rayvision business a success.

Kenny’s professional background is cybersecurity, with previous software development experience in top Chinese bank before being named as Rayvision’s founder, and then taking on the General Manager role. His cyber background has proven useful at Rayvision as he has responsibility for cyber, physical and industrial security on the entire Rayvision’s cloud render farm system. It makes cloud rendering with us a safe and secure experience.

Ben’s 19 years of experiences in Hollywood CG productions with strong understanding on Animation, Visual Effects and TV productions has facilitated the entire growth at Rayvision. His CGI production background has given Rayvision a deeper insight in making our render platform a greater and better one, on par with Hollywood’s standard.

Overall, Rayvision has an outstanding team with over 20 years of CG experience. With professional services and industry-leading innovations, they serve leading special effects companies and animation studios from over 50 countries, including two Oscar winners.

What were major technical hurdles and how the company solved it efficiently?

As the number of users and rendering needs increased significantly, our online rendering platform needed to expand in order to cope with the rendering demands. As a part of our expansion, number of machines and storage space have been added exponentially. It caused our storage system to experience I/O bottleneck, when the storage system does not have fast enough I/O performance.

Our solution for this technical hurdle is to expand storage I/O by using the newly introduced distributed storage system. This distributed storage system is able to solve high concurrency problems that occurs throughout rendering process. It stores rendered data on multitude of storage servers. But, due to distributed mechanism, it all behaves as single storage system. This distributed storage system has solved our platform’s flexibility, speed and cost issues efficiently.

Which new technologies you invented in back-end to support cloud render farms?

One of our greatest technologies that we invented is massively high concurrent distributed rendering system.

Integrity and ease of use have been greatly enhanced continuously. The architecture behind the system is a distributed, high-concurrency, high-performance, high-availability, high-stability and high-scalability system. Back-end application services for distributed microservices architecture design, each service can be deployed independently with independent scale-out expansion. In the new system architecture to support massive user access, it has greatly enhanced the user experience to meet more user needs.

Kindly provide in-depth technical information about Fox Renderfarm.

Fox Renderfarm is a Rayvision overseas cloud render farm service.

Fox Renderfarm has massive numbers of rendering nodes with up to 28 physical cores and hyper-threading to ensure high availability up to 99.99%. It means no waiting is necessary for our 70,000 customers worldwide. Our rendering nodes are equipped with 64GB memory by default and 128GB memory at most. Both CPU and GPU rendering services are supported by, which helps for faster rendering of any complex Visual Effects shot.

The CPU models that we are using in our rendering nodes are the mainstream CPU models in the in the industry. For GPU rendering, we have Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards which are ridiculously so fast, so capable and so extreme in its performance available for our customers to try out!

In the credentials of Indian Animation and VFX industry, online cloud rendering services of Fox Renderfarm has been used in two blockbuster movies: Krrish 3 and Bahubali 2: The Conclusion.

Please brief about the entire production cycle, from client approach to final output delivery.

The entire production cycle for rendering in our cloud rendering farm is relative fast, easy and simple.

With just 4 steps to render, new customers will need to register with us first and there are $20 free credits for every new registration. Then, the customers will proceed to project upload stage by logging in to our web-submission page or desktop client and upload their project files that need to be rendered. The customers have to choose their required CG software, renderer and plugin (if any) and set a few simple parameters before starting the rendering process. The project will be analyzed and rendered automatically. After the rendering is done, the customers can download the rendered frames with a few simple clicks and off they go.

It is just as simple as that!

How do you provide customized render solutions to suit exact need of a client?

We always do our best to provide customized render solutions to suit the exact needs of any customer. Customized online render solutions come with the dedicated private network, dedicated reserved servers, dedicated render storage and dedicated render environments to ensure the whole customized rendering process is immaculate. There are a few stages for customizing render projects:

Project Request → Technical Review → Solution Proposal → Non-Disclosure Agreement → Render Test → Contract Signing → Project Start → Final Delivery

Let us know your pricing policies.

Our render farm pricing is flexible for customers with different kinds of needs. Our render farm operates on a ‘pay as you go’ basis and ranges from Ordinary to VIP4 level, by which VIP4 customers will get a generous 60% off from the Ordinary pricing. The pricing for VIP4 customers can be as low as $0.04 per core hour for CPU rendering and $1 per node per hour (2 GPU cards) for GPU rendering. For large projects, we do offer ample discounts to accommodate the production needs and budgets.

For CG teachers/students, creative small teams and charity groups, we have a “GoCloud program” that aims to help them to realize their dreams. This program has three parts: ‘For Education’, ‘For Creative’ and ‘For Charity’.

For Education: Fox Renderfarm is deeply committed to supporting education and making it accessible to everyone around the world. It offers students, teachers and educational institutions an affordable pricing scheme (VIP4) to support educational purposes.
For Creative: if anyone has big dreams like us, great ideas for the story, excellent skills for the animation, deep passion for the film but only lack of rendering power, then Fox Renderfarm is the right place for you for free rendering after evaluation!
For Charity: Fox Renderfarm has always been a strong advocate, firm supporter and active participant for charities. If anyone hopes to contribute to a charity with his CG works, come on and contact us for free rendering.

Besides that, we have an Unlimited Render Rental Service which allows the customers to rent their own physical machines on our render farm with the setup, software, power, maintenance & technical support all provided by us. The service is a high priority reservation and it is perfect for users that will be continuously submitting an unlimited amount of rendering tasks for the certain period.

What are USPs of Rayvision in peer competition?

We have live customer service & technical support standby 24/7 which will support our customers within 10-15 minutes’ response time. A dedicated project coordinator will also be allocated for large projects to ensure perfect progress on the projects. Our professional and dedicated customer service & technical support team have obtained a lot of good reviews and recognitions from our customers for their excellent services.

Fox Renderfarm customer service & technical support team are waiting for you!

How many software and third-party plug-ins you are supporting right now? What are on shelf for the future?

We Support most popular 3D software, renderers and plug-ins all over the world, customer may contact us for more information and we are always here for their support. We do welcome any suggestion and recommendation, so feel free to let us know!

According to you, what can be future of cloud render farms?

For me, the future of online cloud rendering farm is to be able to become the unsung heroes for all the studios around the world. We would like to introduce the perception that cloud render farm is powerful, cost-efficient, secure and most importantly environmentally friendly.

Studios will not need to spend a fortune on building their own render farms and do not need to worry about capital, operating and maintenance cost. That’s the future of cloud render farms that we hope to achieve. Our green data center is all generated by wind and water power which is natural & clean, it will do no harm to the environment. The data center is located in the district where the climate is dry and the temperature is extremely low all year round, so it’s not necessary to use the air conditioner for cooling most times. The average PUE (Power usage effectiveness) of our data center is under 1.2 which means the energy saving ability is highly effective. Every time the customers use Fox Renderfarm for rendering, they made contributions to reducing greenhouse emissions too!

We are also looking into the integration of other applications with cloud render farms for post-production. Currently, our VIVUE.io video review & collaboration platform is a perfect start and we are hoping to make it a seamless production journey for our customers. VIVUE.io able to solve customer’s video content uploading, reviewing and team collaboration issues anytime and anywhere!

We would like to invite everyone to try us out. Every registered user will get to use VIVUE.io with free storage for FREE! Another good news is Fox Renderfarm users can now log in with their existing account to try out this amazing service!