PipelineFX announced the release of Qube! 6.6 – the company’s render farm management system. Current customers can download version 6.6 from the PipelineFX ftp site. The system will be on display at the company’s SIGGRAPH booth this week in Vancouver.
The new version includes a Smart Share feature to help studios achieve maximum throughput, while Universal Callbacks and Flight Checks promote tight integration with production management/reporting tools.
“As pipelines grow more sophisticated, the need to protect against bottlenecks becomes even more important,” said Richard Lewis, CEO of PipelineFX. “From customer discussions, it’s obvious that efficiency, multi-platform support and easy integration with both new and legacy tools is where Qube! needs to be. Qube! 6.6 takes them there.”
“Qube! 6.6 has been our sole render manager on films like Transformers: Age of Extinction, Noah and Rio 2,” said David Mitchelson, production systems engineer at Deluxe and Qube! 6.6 beta tester. “We put a huge emphasis on stability and it has yet to disappoint. Features like Flight Checks are great because they allow us to create custom scripts that prevent jobs that are going to create bad renders from ever running on the farm. This helps keep us on track and on schedule.”
Smart Share improves overall throughput by automatically re-assigning idle machines once they conclude a job without intervention from an artist or wrangler, in a balanced and controllable way.
Some jobs require an action every time they are run on the farm. To help, Universal Callbacks are automatically executed for every job, instance or frame, giving operators an easy way to maintain integration with other software and scripts.
The Flight Check feature analyzes scripts that will be executed immediately before or after a job or task runs. It ensures that assets that are essential to the job exist, pushing or pulling data from a production tracking system for targeted jobs or tasks, and transfers the results of a render job to a studio’s dailies system.
“Efficiency is the easiest way to weather storms and increase your margins,” said Lewis. “You can’t control everything, but with Qube!, you can control that.”
