AWS Thinkbox Deadline for Moho

[arglborps]

So it appears that cloud rendering for Moho projects on AWS Thinkbox Deadline is a thing, and I've even asked their sales team about pricing, etc.

https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ ... tudio.html

However as all AWS services, it seems horribly complicated setting this up and even the pricing is quite complicated (but affordable it appears). You've got to figure out what kind of instance you want to render on (basically choose between lotsa RAM/little RAM, slower CPU/faster CPU, many or few cores, or something with a beefy GPU, etc.). I consider myself normally fairly solid with technology, back in the day I used to run my own Linux servers for BND, sendmail, apache, wuftp, but reading the AWS Thinkbox manual made my head spin, since there seem to be too many variables and options.

Does anyone have experience with setting this up in their studio and how much effort it was?

It seems the pricing is affordable enough that cloud rendering would be worth considering even for a small studio – or am I missing something?
Why aren't more people using it?
Or are they, but nobody ever mentions it in the media?

The only case study for Moho rendering in the cloud I've been able to find was Cartoon Saloon (it's also mentioned in the Video Webinar about the Puffin Rock animation pipeline).
https://www.awsthinkbox.com/customer-st ... oon-saloon

[Greenlaw]

At work, we use Deadline to render Moho projects, and to render from many other programs like Maya, After Effects, Nuke, Harmony, etc. It's very powerful and it supports many different packages. In our case, a custom tool was created so we can submit Moho projects from within Moho to Deadline, and it's really nice. I like it because is avoids some of the issues with Moho Exporter I've described elsewhere in these forums. I don't think Deadline necessarily does everything our custom submit tool does 'out of the box' though so I would look into that. That said, I think they do support Moho natively and don't require you to create a custom UI.

At home, I used to use a render controller called BNR to submit renders for various animation program. I had about 10 computers to render with, so having a render controller was very convenient. I never set it up for Moho though...I stopped using my personal render farm at around the time I started using Moho. I don't know if BNR natively supported Moho, but it was certainly possible with some scripting knowledge. I think that's the case with many render controllers.

I used this setup mostly for 3D rendering and composting, not so much for 2D animation, but it became a bit of a headache to maintenance every computer for software, plugins, and OS updates, and I finally gave up on it. I felt like I was spending as much time doing IT stuff as I was animating...maybe more.

Nowadays there are commercial render farms that have many more nodes available to render with than I could possible manage or afford, and the services manage all the software/plugin/OS updates for me. Plus, I no longer need to manage all that extra heat in our house and pay large power bills. So far, I've only dabbled with this for 3D animation, but I think I'll find my new workflow more convenient and cost effective when I'm working on a really big project with long renders.

I'm not trying to talk you out of this---personal render farms are certainly convenient---but you should understand what's involved. For me personally, it's no longer worth the hassle.

Personally, I don't find rendering with Moho to be all that slow, at least not compared to rendering 3D animations or heavy comps, which can take hours to complete on a single computer. For Moho renders, I'm fine with just using Moho Exporter and a couple of computers at home to knock this stuff out because it only takes a few minutes. I guess it's all relative.

Let me know what you decide. If you do take the plunge and set up your own render farm, I'm curious to hear what your experience is.

[amanandink]

Yeah we use Deadline in Cartoon Saloon for all our rendering, on Puffin Rock we have Moho and After Effects linked into it, although we make a submission through ShotGrid (previously shotgun) that triggers a rendering of a set file in a set location. that works for scene prep and animation, who work in moho, they dont really need more usability than that. Running it through SG just lets us track notes to version etc.

Its a little more complex for the comp department, they use layer comps in moho that get loaded into the the farm and they re-compile these layer comps with backgrounds and extra stuff in after effects, which they submit a version through SG.

A tricky bit that we found with deadline, in our setup we attach the audio to the renderfarm version at the end, and create a movie. so we just have to point the moho files to the same audio file. actually we have separate audio and video in the files so the animators can turn off the storyboard but keep the audio on if they like.

We have also used the moho exporter, for special renders, from time to time,. It works pretty well if you set up a moho export and save a render profile, then we can just trigger that profile to run then render rather than reset it up.

Cloud rendering would be interesting in these days of remote working, we have a couple of site crew working on the film and it would be awesome to have them linked into our render system, just for the convenience of it

but if you have any questions on our setup, fire away and i'll do my best to answer

[Greenlaw]

Cloud rendering would be interesting in these days of remote working, we have a couple of site crew working on the film and it would be awesome to have them linked into our render system, just for the convenience of it

Yeah, for personal use, cloud rendering is something I am seriously looking into in the near future, but mainly for rendering with Blender and LightWave.

IMO, Moho renders are so quick on a computer with a decent processor and enough RAM that I still don't see much point in rendering Moho on a render farm. At work, for example, by the time my Project file submitted to Deadline has been distributed to multiple computers and started rendering, the file I'm rendering locally is already completed and ready for compositing. It's just not worth it when the rendering takes only a few minutes to complete with one computer.

It's mainly when I creating 3D animation and heavy-compositing, where a project can typically take 10 - 30 minutes per frame to render or in some cases hours per frame, that I want to use a render farm, in-house or on the cloud.

The render-farm I had in our home office is completely dismantled now as I have no desire to further maintain it. It was such a pain in the butt to keep up-to-date and running smoothly for every software package, plugin in, and OS release. Plus, the heat it generated in our small office space during the summer months was just awful. Not worth it IMO.

I talked to a few friends who also had an in-home render farm, and they gave it up for cloud rendering a long time ago.

[davoodice2]

At work, we use Deadline to render Moho projects, and to render from many other programs like Maya, After Effects, Nuke, Harmony, etc. It's very powerful and it supports many different packages. In our case, a custom tool was created so we can submit Moho projects from within Moho to Deadline, and it's really nice. I like it because is avoids some of the issues with Moho Exporter I've described elsewhere in these forums. I don't think Deadline necessarily does everything our custom submit tool does 'out of the box' though so I would look into that. That said, I think they do support Moho natively and don't require you to create a custom UI.

At home, I used to use a render controller called BNR to submit renders for various animation program. I had about 10 computers to render with, so having a render controller was very convenient. I never set it up for Moho though...I stopped using my personal render farm at around the time I started using Moho. I don't know if BNR natively supported Moho, but it was certainly possible with some scripting knowledge. I think that's the case with many render controllers.

I used this setup mostly for 3D rendering and composting, not so much for 2D animation, but it became a bit of a headache to maintenance every computer for software, plugins, and OS updates, and I finally gave up on it. I felt like I was spending as much time doing IT stuff as I was animating...maybe more.

Nowadays there are commercial render farms that have many more nodes available to render with than I could possible manage or afford, and the services manage all the software/plugin/OS updates for me. Plus, I no longer need to manage all that extra heat in our house and pay large power bills. So far, I've only dabbled with this for 3D animation, but I think I'll find my new workflow more convenient and cost effective when I'm working on a really big project with long renders.

I'm not trying to talk you out of this---personal render farms are certainly convenient---but you should understand what's involved. For me personally, it's no longer worth the hassle.

Personally, I don't find rendering with Moho to be all that slow, at least not compared to rendering 3D animations or heavy comps, which can take hours to complete on a single computer. For Moho renders, I'm fine with just using Moho Exporter and a couple of computers at home to knock this stuff out because it only takes a few minutes. I guess it's all relative.

Let me know what you decide. If you do take the plunge and set up your own render farm, I'm curious to hear what your experience is.

can you send me submission script for moho please? I submitted job from deadline monitor window isn't pop-up. I have to copy old submission script.
this script.
[DriveName]:\DeadlineRepository10\scripts\Submission\AnimeStudioSubmission.py

[Greenlaw]

Oh no, I absolutely cannot do that...not if I wish to keep my job!

It probably wouldn't be useful outside of the studio environment anyway. FWIW, I imagine the script was created by the programming team using the documentation provided for Moho (see Appendix G in the User Manual,) Thinkbox Deadline, and any proprietary tools they have at their disposal. (They somehow make almost everything render with Deadline.)

[davoodice2]

Oh no, I absolutely cannot do that...not if I wish to keep my job!

It probably wouldn't be useful outside of the studio environment anyway. FWIW, I imagine the script was created by the programming team using the documentation provided for Moho (see Appendix G in the User Manual,) Thinkbox Deadline, and any proprietary tools they have at their disposal. (They somehow make almost everything render with Deadline.)

thank you man