Sunrise Productions, makers of Africa's first feature length animated film The Legend of the Sky Kingdom and the award-winning Jungle Beat series, is using PipelineFX's Qube! to manage their rendering work and speed up the render pipeline for current and upcoming projects.


Sunrise is a multi award-winning animation production studio that produces animated features, short films for TV, commercials and conceptual designs. Sunrise is currently working on the second season of JUNGLE BEAT, with plans for an additional 52 episodes and a movie version of the series.

Sunrise currently has a three-picture deal with U.S.-based Animated Family Films. They are nearing completion of the first picture with Animated Family Films, THE LION OF JUDAH, due to be released in 2009, and they are in development on AN AFRICAN TALE and THE PINK DOLPHIN PROJECT.

Sunrise has been using Autodesk Maya as their foundation platform and Pixar's RenderMan, Mental Ray and Maya as their renderers. Sunrise chose to deploy Qube! to complete the animation of a children's music video for a range of soft toys called BEARBUM. "Starting a render farm build halfway through production is probably not the most comfortable way to start your pipeline build, unless you do it with Qube!," said Brad Stilwell, Technical Director at Sunrise. "We chose Qube! after considerable research and positive testimonials, and we never looked back. Despite several challenges we faced, we still managed to build the system, finish the jobs on time, and thrill the client."

"Rendering has always been our bottleneck, but for the first time we felt a measure of freedom from the render monster and were able to focus more on the content knowing that we had a little more breathing space coming from a couple more render iterations," said Stilwell. "Qube! was instrumental in allowing us to do this BEARBUM called for a non-photorealistic rendering solution. What we initially thought would be an easier job turned out to be a serious challenge. We had to drive the style of the short towards the style of the already published book, which was rendered with ink and watercolor on paper. Our solution called for multiple layers to be rendered out and composited in After Effects. This, in turn, placed a whole lot of pressure on the render schedule, which is where Qube! came in and helped."

"Support from PipelineFX was great," said Stillwell. "It's been a whole new approach to distributed rendering for us so we were glad the technical support engineers were so helpful in introducing us to the system concepts when we had our hands full. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into Qube!, especially in terms of developing and customizing the system to our particular needs."

source: www.filmmaker.co.za