Stockholm-based boutique VFX shop FABLEfx specializes in creating photoreal CG animals and other furry or feathered creatures for commercial projects and they brought that expertise to a 60-second trailer for the British television show, Dancing On Ice.
The promo starts with a polar bear cub in its family den when it goes out to explore it discovers a squirrel on a melting pond. To the strains of The Impossible Dream, the pair slip, slide and dance their way out of danger.
The VFX studio was able to produce the advertisement with a team of almost 50 artists, including its core team of 12 artists, who work across four countries. To efficiently support these production spikes, FABLEfx renders with cloud-based resources using Conductor.
"We've always envisioned FABLEfx a cloud-based studio, and I’d say everything we do is dependent on good cloud solutions," explained Janak Thakker, Co-Founder and Senior Animation Supervisor at FABLEfx. "We never wanted to build our own render farm, which would have been costly in terms of hardware, electricity, support, cooling, space and licenses, and limited our ability to scale. Conductor makes it easy for us to meet deadlines and stay on budget."
With Conductor, FABLEfx found an easy setup process and a smooth transition for artists who, as a globally dispersed team, were already used to working with cloud-based solutions.Artists are easily able to scale up to powerful rendering resources such as 96 cores with 624 GB of RAM, which can render even heavy effects shots quickly. While cloud has become its go-to for rendering, FABLEfx will occasionally offload small or less time-sensitive projects to local workstations at its Stockholm headquarters.
"Rendering power is a vital ingredient in creating high-end content and Conductor is key for giving us the resources we need," shared Mikael Johansson, Pipeline TD at FABLEfx. "We recently utilized Conductor to render complex, photoreal characters and environments for our biggest project to date – a 60-second full CG spot. Conductor’s support team helped us sort through batch rendering in the cloud and we definitely couldn’t have made our deadline without them."
Thakker added, "Cloud-based resources like Conductor are really helping small studios get to the next level in terms of quality and capacity. Though we’ve only recently started using Conductor, I think in the future we will be using it on all projects."
To view FABLEfx’s recent work, visit: https://www.fablefx.com/