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An impressive Azure story: Pixar’s Renderman

Last week at the PDC2010 keynote, Pixar Animation Studio’s Chris Ford demoed a cloud-hosted prototype of their Academy Award-winning Renderman solution. I wasn’t very impressed with the “cloud” demos I have seen before, but this one blew me away. The application they showed allows anyone from small studios to even indie filmmakers to take advantage of the powers of Renderman, even if they don’t have the resources to establish and support a rendering farm.

What the demo made really impressive was a simple slider where you could balance (in realtime) how much you were willing to pay against how long the rendering job would take. This flexibility to scale (both up and down) is one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing.

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(Pictures from Long Zheng)

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