Fox Renderfarm: Riding the Transformation Wave in Cloud Render Farms

Mike Zheng, Marketing Director

Fox Renderfarm started as an architectural visualization studio to bring their client’s designs, concepts, and vision’s to life. Realizing the pace at which the industry was growing and the immense potential in 3D rendering business, they seized the right opportunity to start their cloud rendering farm service and got invested by Silkroad, Aliyun (an Alibaba cloud computing company), and Legend Capital (a Lenovo company). Pioneering the world’s first self-service online cloud render farm, Fox Renderfarm is a world leading commercial render farm. They have obtained several intellectual property patents through continuous R&D on developing the rendering platform. As a testament to their achievement in providing high-quality cloud rendering services, Fox Renderfarm has been selected as one of the Top 10 HPC Solution Providers by APAC CIO Outlook. They have also been recognized with the “China Cloud Rendering Platform Leading Enterprise Award” and “International Market Development Award.”

The company’s team is filled with many outstanding team members with over 20 years of CG experience. The most crucial core team members are Bin Gao (Founder), Kenny Zou (General Manager) and Ben Cheung (Vice President). They transform Fox Renderfarm business model and process to great success with experiences in software development, cyber, physical, industrial security, Hollywood CG productions fields and strong understanding of Animation, VFX, and TV productions. “Their expertise has provided insights to make Fox Renderfarm platform on par with Hollywood standards,” says Mike Zheng, Marketing Director at Fox Renderfarm.

Fox Renderfarm has brought out an entirely new rendering platform that delivers a new interaction experience, runs more smoothly, automatically reminds rendering timeout, and a click is enough for task clone, no need to resubmit. The platform has a built-in high-speed transmission engine. It is available for use on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and customers can freely submit projects from anywhere and at any time. Additionally, it also deploys SSD storage system to solve the I/O bottleneck. The architecture behind this system is a distributed, high-concurrency, high-performance, high-availability, high-stability and high-scalability system. By providing back-end application services for distributed micro-services architecture design, each service can be deployed independently with independent scale-out expansion.

We provide clients with powerful cloud rendering and high-speed, stable and secure network optimization services, to save investment in enterprise hardware and network resources, improve efficiency, improve rendering and large file transmission experience

Fox Renderfarm is the largest cloud render farm not just in Asia, but throughout the world. They have massive CPU nodes and GPU cards and they leverage the industry’s mainstream models. “We are a 100 percent genuine render farm, and we render 9 million frames per month with a data output of 300 TB per month. Currently, the company has over 120,000 customers from over 50 countries and territories. Our users consist of 80 percent of animation and special effects studios in China including Tencent and Alibaba Eco‘s studios. In 2016, of the 25 Chinese 3D animation films released, 18 used Fox Renderfarm’s services, while in 2017, it increased to 10 of just 18 films. We have also provided rendering service for Oscar-winning films. Our online cloud rendering services were also used in the production of several Indian blockbuster movies like Krrish 3 and Bahubali 1 and 2,” adds Zheng.

The entire production cycle is relatively faster, easier, and simple. Once a new customer registers, they get $20 free credits per new registration. Then they need to login to web-submission page or desktop client and upload their project files that need to be rendered. Before starting the rendering process, customers need to choose the supported CG software, renderer, or plug-in, and set a few simple parameters. The project is then analyzed and rendered automatically. After rendering, customers can download the rendered frames with a few simple clicks. Additionally, they support most popular 3D software, renderers and plug-ins all over the world.

Fox Renderfarm’s RaySync is a provider of big data transmission acceleration and network optimization services for clients worldwide. It allows for high-speed big data transmission with concurrent transmission 100 times faster than TCP/IP. By optimizing the WAN on long-range transmissions, it supports transnational transmissions. They have also applied FTPS and TLS protocols for data transmission encryption. It also increases reliability through comprehensive security solutions, multiple validation mechanisms, and providing resuming and failover. “By combining the RaySync transmission engine and traditional network resources we provide clients with powerful cloud rendering and high-speed, stable and secure network optimization services, to save investment in enterprise hardware and network resources, improve efficiency, improve rendering and large file transmission experience,” adds Zheng. The customers that leverage RaySync include Huawei, Wanda Media, Global Digital Creations, and so on.

“We look to create a world where studios will no longer have to spend a fortune on building, operating, and maintaining their render farms,” says Zheng. The company’s green data centers are located in a district where the climate is dry, and the temperature is very low throughout the year to reduce the use of air conditioners. The power used in these data centers are generated from wind and water energy. The average PUE of their data center is under 1.2 which results in high energy savings. “Every time customers use Fox Renderfarm for rendering, they made contributions to reducing greenhouse emissions too!” concludes Zheng.