LOS ANGELES – At SIGGRAPH 2015 in Los Angeles, GridMarkets (
www.GridMarkets.com), a cloud rendering service powered by thousands of high-performance servers, announced a strategic partnership with Side Effects Software, leading vendor of 3D animation and visual effects software.
Gridmarkets leverages the abundant and affordable spare server capacity to power its high-performance rendering platform. The company is poised to become the next example of the sharing economy trend, following into the footsteps of taxi-hailing service Uber and real-estate-subletting service Airbnb.
“To design the service that is being launched today, we worked directly with the Houdini community of artists and engineers
,” says GridMarkets
’ co-founder Mark Ross.
“We see it as our mission
to democratize creativity by providing
an affordable, secure and user friendly service
for independent artists and medium
-sized studios that are typically strapped for time and resources. Lowering the render costs and time pressures that are currently weighing down these artists will result in greater creative diversity within today
’s highly competitive
animation and VFX market.
”
No doubt reduced render costs will be welcome news for Houdini artists and studios, as will the fact that the new service supports complex dependencies, simulations and file caching.
"Studios and independent artists need rendering solutions that are simple to use and that address budget and time pressures,” agrees Kim Davidson, President and CEO, Side Effects Software. “Our partnership with GridMarkets is aimed at doing just that. GridMarkets is a proven platform that delivers significant computational horsepower to critical rendering projects and the interface and business model make it simple and affordable to use."
The Gridmarkets platform is currently being beta tested by experienced Houdini artists.
Gridmarkets is also providing rendering services for users of other major software packages through affiliated render farms and strategic partners.