Open Firehawk presents at SIGGRAPH Asia 2019

 

At SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 (in Brisbane) we had the opportunity to present the progress on Open Firehawk at the Houdini Hive with Side Effects. We were able to show a few milestones for this project:

  • We demonstrated with with Open Source Infrastructure as code, it was possible to achieve much lower cost simulation and rendering for VFX (2-8x cheaper than other available options),

  • We also showed this was done with more control and more efficient workflows using Side FX PDG to handle per frame dependencies between cloud computing and onsite workstations, spreading our bandwidth out over the course of a simulation.

  • Workflows were optimised to save cost and enable a “bail out early” workflow before rendering had gone too far to save cost on undesired results

  • Remote GPU Workstations using Teradici PCOIP were used to interact with the heavy simulation, avoiding transfer costs.

Andrew Grahamside fx, pdg, open firehawk, openfirehawk, firehawk