Following its launch at FMX 2018 last year, Foundry is now closing the gates to pipeline heaven again. The company is no longer accepting new projects on the cloud platform with immediate effect. Current users still have until 1 June 2020 to retrieve existing project data from Athera ‘s internal storage.
The Athera Cloud Pipeline
First known as Elara, the Foundry project was released in April 2018 with the aim of being able to run the entire VFX pipeline on a virtualised PC in the cloud. Not only software tools from Foundry but also from third-party providers such as SideFX Houdini, Blender and later Maya could be selected. In our DP issue 18 : 04, we took a closer look at Athera – you can read the article here for free.
Athera was intended to appeal to both large and small studios, as well as freelancers, and to be easily scalable according to requirements. Among other things, there were no recurring subscription fees for this concept – users could scale licences according to their projects and only pay for what they needed. However, this offer ultimately failed to appeal to the market. In an interview with fxGuide, Simon Robinson (Foundry Chief Scientist) explained that one of the reasons for this was that most companies currently still use a mix of local and cloud services in order to achieve optimum efficiency and costs.
Official announcement from the Athera website
“Please note that the Athera platform is no longer available and we are not accepting new projects. Foundry remains committed to helping customers create and collaborate from anywhere, and we have some exciting future plans for cloud and collaboration across our product portfolio. In the meantime, for any enquiries related to Athera, please email contact@athera.io.
NOTE: Data in Athera’s Internal Storage will be deleted on June 1, 2020. If you have data in Internal Storage that you wish to retrieve, then please contact us at contact@athera.io and we will be pleased to assist you.”
Further information: To the Athera website
