In nuce: travelling expenses for the foreign shoot in Dubai, the IT specialist is working on the equipment, the coffee machine needs to be fed with new capsules – and then spending money on plug-in gadgets? Well, show business isn’t just about show, it’s about business (and that means costs). AWS Thinkbox (Amazon Web Services Thinkbox) has made its software solutions (including Deadline, Draft and Krakatoa) freely available – at no cost to users. The corresponding blog post states that Thinkbox’s tools make the work of VFX studios easier, naming well-known companies such as Framestore, Pixomondo and Scanline among the studios that use Thinkbox tools.
What will change for existing customers? Existing Deadline customers simply continue to use the software until the current licence expires. Users can then continue to use Deadline free of charge – without a licence. The latest versions of Krakatoa, Frost, XMesh and Stoke are also available for free download. Users can also download software licences for Sequoia free of charge – from the so-called floating licence portal.
What can the AWS Thinkbox tools do? An overview of what the software offering can do is provided below.
- Deadline: Allows users to manage render farms and optimise the resources of their computers
- Draft: This is used to perform simple post-render compositing tasks
- Krakatoa: a toolkit for volumetric particle rendering
- XMesh is used for caching meshes
- Frost: This allows users to generate meshes from particles – namely a single mesh
- Stoke: is a tool for particle simulation
Click further: All further information on the free software solutions from AWS Thinkbox in the corresponding blog post by Senior Product Manager Bharathi Muthukrishnan. Interested users can download the desired software from the corresponding AWS Thinkbox download page .
