Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 28, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The Boston-based company Zync will now become part of Google’s platform team following the acquisition. The cloud renderer was developed by the VFX studio Zero VFX in 2011 and is said to have already been used for more than 6.5 million hours of video material. Feature films for which the studio has already used Zync include "Star Trek Into Darkness", "American Hustle" and "Looper", as well as more than one hundred commercials.
By making Zync a service on the Google Cloud platform, customers are to receive a better service and VFX studios are to access Google’s cloud services more frequently. This is intended to mean that both large and smaller companies are no longer forced to purchase expensive render farms that remain unused at times depending on project utilisation. The cloud renderer is rented computing power through which studios can plan better with "per-minute" billing.
Zync supports Maya 2012, 2013, 2013.5 and 2014, Nuke from version 6, V-Ray for Maya and Mental Ray Standalone Arnold for Maya. Plug-ins it can work with are GenArts Sapphire (see also DP issue 07/14, which appears tomorrow), Furnace and Ocula from The Foundry.
All further information about Zync can be found here.
So, will Google soon play a major role in large Hollywood productions?
In DP issue 06/14, we present the current open-source/Creative Commons project by Jan Walter/The Mill, which is intended to make productions renderer-independent in future.
