Y-Film, Better Visual Effects on Linux Render Farms

Terra Soft, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux distribution, declares that its new offering for "render farms" (computer clusters used for creating digital visual effects in movies), Y-Film, can significantly improve the tasks done by render farms, bringing a more efficient process to large studios and giving even to the smaller studios eye-catching visual effects.

To create Y-Film, Terra Soft teamed up with Circle-S Studios. Y-Film is a set of visual effects, management and productivity tools coupled with 3Delight RenderMan (created by DNA Research) compliant rendering engine and Y-HPC cluster construction suite, from Terra Soft.

The alpha version of the new product will be displayed tomorrow, at the Supercomputing Expo in Reno, Nevada, USA. Although the presentation will take place tomorrow, Y-Film will not be available until the second quarter of the following year, as Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft Solutions said.

Y-Film is made up of two different applications, one is a cluster construction suite supported by Terra Soft's Y-HPC platform, and the other is called "Artist Productivity and Asset Management Tools", created by Scott Frankel, president and VFX supervisor at Circle-S Studios and lead developer of Y-Film. The tools can be run on x86 Linux, Power Linux and Mac OS X architectures.

The set of artist workstation tools manage Visual Effects (VFX) assets from workstation to render farm, keeping the integrity of shot modifications. They properly integrate the output of Maya and/or Shake through mental ray and/or 3Delight or RenderMan, as Staats explained.

The software includes a database that is kept on the render farm, which receives and manages film shot information so it allows many artists to work on the same render farm simultaneously, without getting their data mixed up.

Staats also said: "In this respect, our Y-HPC cluster construction suite builds the render farm, and Scott's tools tie the artist workstation to the render farm built by Y-HPC."

At this moment Tera Soft Solutions is working with key beta site customers for immediate integration, testing and production of the Y-Film software.