"One picture, rendering 20 hours", you still want to create the metaverse?

Author | He Sisi

Editor | Zhou Lei

In the autumn and winter of 2021, no word is more popular than "metaverse".

But stripping away the hype and putting aside the crazy enthusiasm, the Metaverse is not a trend that is completely separated from human life at this stage. On the contrary, it has pointed out some more specific and difficult directions for technological development.

“The Metaverse will certainly not be achieved overnight. At this stage, its focus in video is ultra-high-definition VR videos and VR games.” A person in the video cloud industry who is paying attention to the Metaverse pointed out that this means a higher pursuit of image quality and special effects, and the challenge to rendering performance is unprecedentedly intensified.

People's strong desire for the virtual world has not only brought confidence to the development of my country's metaverse industry, but also inspired the public's attention and outlook on the technical capabilities behind it, such as rendering. Everyone agrees that traditional rendering methods have long been unable to meet the development needs of the metaverse due to high costs, low efficiency, and poor results. Therefore, "cloud rendering" has risen to the infrastructure level of the metaverse.

In fact, "cloud rendering" has been a technology for nearly a decade, mainly serving production companies including computer animation, film and television special effects, architectural design visualization, games, and commercial advertisements. As early as the concept was born, it attracted many manufacturers to join.

But new things often give birth to new forces. Under the wave of the Metaverse, cloud rendering may be facing a new round of take-off. Faced with new tracks and new competitive situations, how should enterprises plan? What development trends will be presented in the future? With these questions, Leifeng.com recently had an in-depth dialogue with Jin Wei, general manager of Zanqi Technology, trying to find answers to the questions through this dialogue.

"Cloud rendering" (Cloud Render) did not come out of nowhere.

It is similar to conventional cloud computing, that is, the 3D program is rendered in a remote server, and the user terminal clicks a "cloud rendering" button through Web software or directly in the local 3D program and accesses resources with the help of high-speed Internet access. Instructions are issued from the user terminal, and the server executes the corresponding rendering task according to the instructions, and the rendering result image is transmitted back to the user terminal for display.

Before the concept of cloud rendering became popular, there were many rendering software on the market, such as: various CG software comes with rendering engines, and RenderMan, etc. After the models and animation frames are made using 3DS MAX, MAYA and other software for architectural design and animation production, the designed content is made into the final effect map or animation using the software itself or auxiliary software (lightscape, vray, etc.) - this is what we call traditional (local) rendering.

Jin Wei, general manager of Zanchi Technology, told Leifeng.com that rendering is a necessary step in the CG production process and consumes a lot of resources. Before the cloud rendering solution came out, production and rendering were completed locally, which was not only time-consuming but also inefficient.

According to Leifeng.com, in the traditional rendering era, it usually takes 20 hours for CG production to render images using a local computer, which is a considerable expense in terms of manpower and financial resources.

But nowadays, the traditional rendering market is gradually shrinking. On the one hand, due to the general trend of digital economy, traditional industries have moved to the cloud, and the rendering industry is no exception.

On the other hand, the rapid development of industries with high rendering requirements, including film and television, animation industry, and games, has put forward higher efficiency requirements for rendering. Taking the game industry as an example, according to relevant data, the actual total marketing amount of the domestic game market in 2020 was 278.687 billion yuan, an increase of 47.81 billion yuan over the previous year, a year-on-year increase of 20.71%, and continued to maintain a relatively fast growth rate.

Compared with traditional rendering methods, "cloud rendering" is much easier. As long as the material is uploaded to the cloud, it can be rendered remotely through the cloud computing system of the cloud vendor. This means that no matter where the special effects artist is, they can use cloud rendering to complete the "three steps": upload the material; wait for the rendering to be completed; download it locally.

Compared with the 20 hours mentioned above, cloud rendering can shorten the time to 2 hours. The key point is that multiple tasks can be rendered simultaneously. Originally, a local single computer could only render one picture at a time, but now cloud rendering can render 10 to 20 pictures at a time. In this way, there is no need for workstations, no CPU competition, and the loss of local computers is avoided. The pictures can also be quickly produced, which greatly improves the efficiency of the industry.

It can be seen that cloud rendering is needed and used at the right time.

In fact, the concept of cloud rendering was first proposed by AMD and immediately attracted the attention of the outside world. It is understood that there were no companies that could really do cloud rendering at the time. Even the pioneers of cloud computing, IBM and SUN, were unable to develop a cloud rendering platform on their own, so you can imagine how difficult it was.

However, after the evolution of history and the continuous change of technology, my country's cloud rendering market has experienced changes from disorder to order, from small to large, and from unprofessional to professional. In this evolutionary process, the cloud rendering platform has also evolved from a pure physical machine platform, a physical machine + cloud server platform to the current pure cloud server platform.

As far as the current development trend of "cloud rendering" in China is concerned, many "rendering farms" have shown different development trends.

• First, large IT companies have launched various "cloud computing" services such as "cloud rendering" to customers based on their existing software and hardware;
• Second, a large number of cultural and creative enterprises have invested in and built "cloud rendering" centers, which provide rendering services to the public while providing services for their own cultural products;
• The third is high-tech companies that directly target “cloud rendering” services.

For cloud rendering platforms, cloud computing resources are more in line with their own development characteristics. By utilizing the high performance and high elasticity of cloud servers, computing resources can be scheduled on demand to avoid the problem of idle machines like pure rendering farms. At the same time, high-performance machines make it easier to upgrade and replace them, which is more in line with the current high-frequency iteration characteristics of computing resources.

So, how do we take the first step from the original pure physical rendering to the current cloud rendering?

Jin Wei shared Zanchi Technology's experience in exploring cloud rendering platforms. He said that seven or eight years ago, we first used our own private cloud deployment capabilities and solutions to launch the first generation of products to the market. Now we use public cloud capabilities to iterate and innovate our products.

In the face of the booming public cloud market, why did people choose private cloud in the early days? Jin Wei said that the public cloud market was not mature in the early days. Compared with public cloud, private cloud can be deployed and set up according to user needs, providing corresponding servers and nodes, and has strong flexibility. However, the configuration of public cloud in the early days could not correspond to thousands of industries and various professional fields in a timely manner.

"To build a tall house, the foundation must be dug well. Only on a more solid foundation can a taller house be built."

In recent years, the public cloud market has finally ushered in an explosive period. According to the "China Public Cloud Service Market (2021 First Half) Tracking" report, in the first half of 2021, the overall market size of China's public cloud services (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) reached US$12.31 billion, of which the IaaS market grew by 47.5% year-on-year and the PaaS market grew by 53.9% year-on-year, maintaining the highest growth rate in the world.

Based on this, in terms of cloud rendering, most platform vendors choose to shift from private cloud to public cloud model.

It is understood that Zanqi Technology began to migrate from private cloud to public cloud in early 2018, and cooperated with Huawei Cloud to create cloud rendering solutions for the entire industry. According to Jin Wei, the disadvantages of private cloud are gradually emerging as the public cloud market becomes more mature.

Jin Wei explained that the disadvantages of private cloud are that operation, maintenance, development, and construction need to be done by oneself. In addition to SaaS, IaaS is also required, and there are huge bottlenecks in scalability and capability improvement. Public cloud vendors, such as Huawei, have strong operation and maintenance capabilities, R&D capabilities, and their entire underlying construction is also very mature.

He also gave a specific example, saying that if rendering a movie requires 2,000 servers, we can instantly reach 3,000 servers if we use a public cloud. If the same situation is used with a private cloud, first, it does not have sufficient machine resources. Second, its storage capacity is not enough to support concurrency. To run a project at the same time, only when the concurrency can reach 2,000 servers can we ensure that there will be no failures. Basically, all private clouds do not have this capability.

"In the digital age, a SaaS company is more about collaboration, with professional people doing professional things."

From a domestic and even global perspective, the cloud rendering industry shows a steady growth trend. What is more noteworthy is that there are actually not many cloud rendering companies or platforms in the true sense.

First of all, cloud rendering emphasizes a series of overall solutions including R&D, technology, solutions, docking, customer service, etc. In addition, cloud rendering is very demanding on the technical capabilities of the cloud bottom layer and the stability of the solution. In addition to the product bottom layer R&D and interactive end applications, the Paas layer alone requires the support of more than ten capabilities such as integration, scheduling, decoupling, collaboration, elasticity, microservices, and containers.

These deficiencies are precisely the advantages of public cloud vendors. Obviously, in the public cloud boom, private cloud deployment has become a thing of the past, and cooperation between SaaS vendors and public cloud vendors will be the only choice.

"Rendering corresponds to the complete delivery of solutions for the entire industry, and technical capabilities are a necessary guarantee. Public cloud can meet the needs of SaaS vendors. Cooperation with cloud vendors can complement each other's advantages and expand technology boundaries, resource boundaries and business development boundaries more quickly," Jin Wei added.

It will still take a long time for cloud rendering to go from concept to reality, but we are also clearly aware that cloud rendering is not science fiction, but an upcoming reality.

At the end of the interview, Jin Wei said that with the development of the CG industry and the popularization of 3D visualization in many fields, the cloud rendering industry has made great progress. In the future, with the popularization of concepts and applications such as VR and the metaverse, coupled with the increasing demand of the existing industry itself, it will continue to grow at a high rate.

At the same time, he also mentioned that leading technology research and development, business service team capabilities and stable delivery levels are the core capabilities of the cloud rendering platform in the future. In the competition of the industry, more users should understand the security and capabilities of the cloud, feel more at ease in the cloud, and not exceed the budget for the cloud. These are what the entire industry should jointly promote.

From December 9th to 11th, Leifeng.com will host the 6th GAIR Global Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Conference. During the conference, we will hold the "Next Generation Internet - Metaverse Technology Summit Forum" and invite practitioners from multiple industries such as well-known UGC game platforms, VR/AR/MR manufacturers, social companies, NFT veterans, and artificial intelligence companies to clearly show the future of the metaverse to the audience. For details of the summit, please click [Read original text] .