OpenCue, a joint venture open source visual effect render manager from Google and Sony.

OpenCue, a next-generation solution for rendering.

When creating the movie Avatar, Weta Digital had to process a humungous Eight Terabytes of data per second a day for over a month in their 10,000 square foot of server farm. And this data is giving us a clear vision of how massive the data was. In order to cope with such big data, Weta Digital had to work with 40,000 processors and 104 Terabytes of memory. Now you tell, how costly and how much amount of data is needed when it comes to visual effect rendering. It's HUGE!

In these days, architectures are working with the latest and best 3d Rendering software to create close to real visualization. It enables them to satisfy their clients and walk them through the virtual world. Now clients can see their projects from many angles and see what materials can be or will be used for their Interior or Exterior projects. We have some big names that are yet to take their footsteps into the virtual rendering world. Such as Google and Sony. They are the big name who is a newcomer in this industry and we can obviously wish that they'll push their limits to make all the necessary efforts to make virtual effects to a whole new level.
As we all know virtual effect or virtual reality is very costly. And it also takes up a huge amount of physical servers and data storage. And Google + Sony is making it look simpler and cost-effective. And their solution is a Cloud-based system. Together they came up with this cloud-based technology and named this technology OpenCue.
OpenCue is a high-performance open source rendering manager that has the ability to scaling up to millions of shots if all of them are given to a suitable hybrid cloud store based environment.

High demand meets an adequate solution. 

Today visual content product is facing a huge amount of demand from around the globe. Pretty much every content creator is moving towards virtual reality. Because it is the future of content. So the demand is higher than ever. And this constant demand is the real challenge for the visual studios. To cope up with this increasing amount of visualization demand, they are forced to find new and better ways to visualize the project. And those also need to be more cost-effective. 

According to Todd Prives, the Product Manager of Google Cloud,

While on-premises render farms are still the most widely used solution. However, the security and, most importantly, scalability that the cloud offers, are the right tools that a visual effects studio needs to adapt and adjust to the fast-paced and rapid global production deadlines and agendas.
If you look at this from a technical point of view and take the history Sony has in developing the most amazing software tools, it was only logical to put two and two together and come up with something of an ideal partnership.

Evolution is coming.

As a hybrid cloud rendering software manager, OpenCue is the next generation solution for the visualization industry and this is the start of an evolution. Sony Pictures is already using Imageworks as its internal queuing system. Cue 3, the predecessor of OpenCue was already a product of technological advancement for the last 15 years and it has shown the real result.
This type of advanced rendering software from Sony has already been used in many visual effects and animations. This software has a tremendous ability to scaling up to 150,000 cores between Google's GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and Sony's uncompromised data center.

OpenCue Architecture

The secret of the ultimate power of the OpenCue is the most amazing and masterpiece architecture of it. From this architecture, OpenCue gets the ultimate power. It has its own tagging system so that it can easily allocate the required machine with specific jobs. It uses the tech to speed up the entire process within a mere of a second. Adding to it, it supports multiple concurrent machines. Here comes the most interesting part of this system. This architecture system allows the rendering workload to be done in the background on a central rendering farm. It makes the visual artist move away from monitoring the workload and be completely free. When rendering in the background, each host splits up to a different number of processes where each of the processes run on their own memory requirements and reserved core. OpenCue architecture allows the visual effect studios to utilize the full power and advantages of GCP to create and scale some extraordinary visual effects. And these huge advantages create an enormous possibility for the 3D Rendering services industry to bump up and grow ever quicker. 

Features of OpenCue:

• A single task can process a limitless number of processes.
• Integrated automated booking.
• It has the capability to split up into a number of processes.
• It has a particularly individually reserved core for every process backed up by GCP.
• Individual memory requirements for each process.
• It has the support for cloud, hybrid and multi-functionality deployment.
• Native multi-threading support for Katana, PRMAN and Arnold.