Autodesk R&D News: Web-Based Rendering for 3ds Max On the Way

The CPU and GPU in your workstation may be top of the line, but they cannot possibly compete with a cluster comprising 32 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. So what if you can dial up (so to speak) the rendering horsepower of that cluster, or some other remote cluster with far more cores than your own machine? That could mean cutting down your rendering time from three hours to 15 minutes, depending on the complexity of your scene. If you're a 3ds Max user, this is exactly what you'd be able to do sometime in the near future, according to Ken Pimentel, Autodesk's director of visual communication solutions, media & entertainment.

At the recent NVIDIA GPU Tech Conference, Pimentel joined Michael Kaplan, mental images' VP of strategic development, and Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, on stage to demonstrate a research project currently in the work at Autodesk. The new feature will allow 3dx Max users to tap into reality server, mental images' cloud-hosted rendering platform powered by Tesla GPUs, to do their rendering at a much faster speed than they can on their own local machine.

As with any R&D project, Autodesk is not yet prepared to reveal how this service will be offered, how much it will charge, and when it'll be available, but for now you can salivate over the renderings shown here, produced using the same model demonstrated at NVIDIA GTC.

For more, listen to my recorded interview with Ken Pimentel below.