SAN JOSE, CA – GreenButton, a leading provider of compute-intensive and integrated on-demand cloud solutions, has announced a partnership with NVIDIA, which complements the company’s existing offerings in the Digital Media and Entertainment industry and provides a more complete service for both studios and freelance artists.
Mental Ray is the most widely available production rendering solution, and the native renderer within the Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, and Softimage product suites.By enabling Mental Ray in the cloud through GreenButton, any Maya, 3ds Max and Softimage product owners will now have the ability to access massive computing resources on-demand at an extremely affordable cost.
The partnership provides a multitude of benefits for joint customers, including the ability to access massive computing power on-demand with no upfront investment. In the world of VFX and computer graphics, this opens up the opportunity for users to compete in a market of creative resources and increasingly high businessdemands. Freelancers and small houses can now compete for the same jobs as larger studios and companies. In addition, users have the ability to consume the very valuable Mental Ray licenses on a per-use basis. All computing time and license use is metered to the millisecond providing an incredibly cost-effective solution. With the service, small to medium studios can gainaccess to tens of thousands of cores that would otherwise be unattainable. Larger studios can use the service to accommodate peak periods without over-provisioning.
GreenButton's Cloud Fabric platform provides the cloud access (via a plugin in Maya and 3ds Max), job distribution and execution, billing support and license management that the service depends upon, whereas, GreenButton Mission Control provides a management dashboard for the service as well as comprehensive reporting - such as usage, budgeting and job progress. In addition, there's the CloudSync capability, which adds a critical component for those large and complex datasets that need to be synchronized with the cloud prior to rendering, with the added bonus of GridFTP support for acceleratedtransfers using the UDP protocol.
"This is a great partnership for GreenButton," said Scott Houston, chief executive officer of GreenButton. "It allows us to address a bigger slice of the Digital Media and Entertainment industry, a key market for us. NVIDIA was a logical partner given the breadth and depth and quality of their products. We are looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship, and are thrilled that together we can provide a more completeservice for larger and smaller independent studios alike."
The GreenButton Mental Ray renderer in the cloud is available immediately.