Zync, Google’s cloud-based visual effects rendering solution for movie houses and other VFX artists, is now entering its first beta on Google’s Cloud Platform, the now Alphabet-owned search giant announced via a blog-post.
Zync, acquired by Google in August last year, is a cloud-based visual effects rendering platform which lets VFX artists work on massive softwares like Maya and Nuke, on the cloud. This basically frees smaller VFX teams from building their own high performance computing infrastructure for rendering top quality video effects.
And while creators of Zync kept smaller VFX teams in mind, movies liek Transformers, American Hustle and others have already utilised the power and scalability of Zync for those awesome VFX we witnessed in these movies.
Zync’s first beta on Google’s cloud platform is slated to go live next week on 8/20. The company is inviting artists to sign up and be notified when Zync launches next week, and get access to 1,600 dedicated Compute Engine cores to power their V-Ray, Arnold and Nuke-based renders.
Zync was designed at a visual effects studio based on a workflow that fits VFX artists’ existing pipelines. With Zync now powered by Google Cloud Platform, artists get the scale, performance, and security of Google’s infrastructure while still maintaining the familiarity and interactivity of a local render farm.
What’s even more interesting for VFX artists, is the fact that Google’s cloud platform will now govern Zync’s pricing policies, thus allowing artists to spin up compute nodes on-demand in minutes.
Sensitive to the critical, schedule-driven needs of creative professionals doing rendering work, Google will offer Monday-Friday support with 4-hour response times during business hours.
In addition to the existing platforms which it supports, Google also announced Zync support for Pixar’s 25-year old RenderMan software with a beta available in the coming month.
