Thursday, November 6th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Atomic Fiction to launch cloud rendering service

141006_AtomicFictionConductor

VFX facility Atomic Fiction is to launch Conductor, its own cloud-based computing platform. The service, due to launch in beta next year, is targeted at both visual effects and other computationally intensive industries.

From private to public cloud
On its foundation in 2010, Atomic Fiction was an early champion of the potential of cloud rendering for visual effects work, adopting a cloud workflow on movies like Flight and, more recently, Transformers: Age of Extinction.

To complete the work, the studio partnered with cloud-rendering provider ZYNC, recently acquired by Google.

Now the company is aiming to make that cloud infrastructure publicly accessible with the launch of Conductor, an online “task-processing platform” based on Google Cloud Platform.

Conductor will enable users to run any commercial or proprietary software with “full support for custom in-house scripts and plugins” and will be accessible from Windows, Linux and Mac devices.

As well as visual effects and animation, potential uses for the platform namechecked on the new Conductor website include “protein folding, oil and gas discovery [and] computational fluid dynamics simulations”.

In beta next year: sign up online
So far, there isn’t a lot more detail than that. Conductor is due to launch in private beta early in 2015: anyone interested can sign up on the website via the link below.

Read more about Conductor on the service’s website
(Includes link to register for the beta program)

Atomic Fiction co-founder Ryan Tudhope discusses Atomic Fiction’s own cloud-rendering workflow