Sponsored Article: Rendering is the bottleneck between you and your profits
If you provided a group of VFX artists, animators, editors, and filmmakers with the same script and asked them to create the visuals necessary to convey the story, the end result would be a collection of images as unique and disparate as the professionals who created them. But, if you took this same group of motion media pros and asked them to name the primary bottleneck in their creative workflows, chances are, you would reach a clear consensus. The prevailing bottleneck that plagues all is rendering. It can turn the most powerful workstation into a “wait station,” grinding productivity to a halt. But hours spent waiting for renders not only slows productivity, it results in lost time, severely affecting your bottom line. Large studios, as well as many of your competitors, enjoy the advantage of a render farm, a network of dedicated CPUs to which they can offload the process. But render farms are expensive, require substantial (and costly) square footage, and require IT personnel. So what’s the solution?
If you need the power of a render farm without the unwanted cost and complexity, BOXX Technologies offers renderPRO, a complete computer powered by dual Intel® Xeon® processors and available with up to 28 cores and 256GB of memory. The quiet and compact renderPRO (less than 7” wide, 20” long, and 3.5” high) is the only personal dedicated rendering and simulation solution designed to sit at your desk side or on top of a BOXX workstation.
Expertly engineered for maximum stability under the most demanding loads, renderPRO is also surprisingly mobile. In fact, it makes the ideal companion for a laptop or mobile workstation. Many renderPRO users report that they deploy their system at both work and at home since it is easy to transport and set up. So what if your 3D graphics, VFX, animation, or compositing workflow demands more than just a single renderPRO module? Not to worry, as you can purchase several renderPRO systems and stack them on top of one other for a powerhouse render farm.
Like all BOXX hardware, renderPRO is manufactured in the US and designed to run all industry standard software applications. It has also been thoroughly tested for maximum performance by BOXXlabs while legendary BOXX Technical Support (located at BOXX Technologies headquarters) provides unparalleled knowledge of hardware, industry leading software, and your specific workflow.
renderPRO is a key component of the “BOXX Workflow” which emphasizes a thorough understanding of your software applications’ compute requirements and explains why an overclocked BOXX workstation and renderPRO are necessary to increase your productivity and profit. Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya®, as well as Cinema 4D and other 3D applications, employ a variety of tools and features with distinct compute requirements. These requirements fall under two main categories: single threaded or multi-threaded. Single threaded tasks benefit from high frequency CPUs, while multi-threaded tasks benefit from multiple CPU cores. The BOXX workflow addresses these specific bottlenecks with a unique hardware solution package designed to maximize creative productivity.
Tasks like modeling, animating, texturing and general scene interaction are predominantly single threaded, so any increase the number of CPU cores fails to improve productivity. What the situation requires is the fastest CPU clock speed available—precisely what BOXX overclocked workstations provide. The result is peak productivity, enabling you to accomplish more and thereby earn more money.
Rendering, on the other hand, is a highly multi-threaded process. The more CPU cores you have available for rendering, the shorter your render times will be. However, you do not want to render on your local workstation where low frame rates inhibit your ability to create, interact, and manipulate 3D meshes in your scenes. By offloading computationally intensive rendering to the renderPRO, your viewport frame rates will remain high and you can stay productive in all areas of your workflow.
As VFX, artists, animators, editors, and filmmakers, we’re most comfortable within our creative zone. However, as professionals struggling to earn a living in this business, we must always remember to pay equal attention to the business side of the equation. The bottom line is this: if you’re waiting for your creative work to render, it’s costing you money. If you’re waiting in line for the company render farm, that’s costing your studio employer money. For rendering performance at work, on the road, or at home, renderPRO is the solution. Easily configurable to meet your workflow needs, it requires no server room or IT personnel and frees your workstation, bringing dedicated rendering to your desk side. Save time, save money, increase productivity and increase profit. BOXX Technologies’ renderPRO is the hardware solution that makes sense.
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