Digital daringTaylor James gets rapid rendering feedback from AMD FireProTM V7900 professional graphics and V-Ray RT

SOLUTION OVERVIEW | TAYLORJAMES

Is that real or is it CGI?Futuristic landscapes and strange scenarios indicate that we are watching computer generated imagery (CGI) yet our brains struggle to accept that such realistic visual quality is just make-believe. And when sassy CGI is artfully blended with lustrous live action and powerful photography the edges are blurred even more. That’s the kind of world that Taylor James creates.

When companies want to blazen a brand through an imaginative campaign they call in the services of this high-end creative production studio. Blending innovative storytelling with technical expertise, a dash of drama and a pinch of wit, it delivers content for broadcast, interactive and print media to global clients including Infiniti, Toyota, Heineken, Guinness, British Airways and Turkish Airlines. With offices in London and New York, Taylor James is as comfortable with daring digital as it is with traditional print.

Manipulating mega files With customer expectations on the increase and project timescales ever decreasing, improving workflow efficiency is more and more important to Taylor James, which continually reviews its use of hardware and software. The company uses Autodesk®3ds Max® and in recent years has standardized on V-Ray, the rendering engine from CHAOS Group. Keith Jeffery, Head of Business Development explains why: “V-Ray gives us excellent rendering performance and consistency. Some other solutions are just not as intuitive or flexible.”

In order to manipulate huge data sets the visual artists at Taylor James rely heavily on graphics hardware from AMD. Keith again: “AMD works extensively to improve its software drivers and cards which is vitally important for us because of the size of our models.”

In 2011 Taylor James began using the AMD FirePro V7900 professional graphics. “This has given us a step change in performance,” he says. “With 2GB of onboard memory the AMD FirePro V7900 is a very powerful card and it is enabling us to manipulate data sets that we previously struggled with.” This is confirmed by David Wortley, Lead R&D Artist, “The V7900 is much quicker compared with our existing range of cards.”

The computational power of AMD’s graphics is allowing Taylor James to test the latest release from CHAOS Group: V-Ray RT (Real-Time), the first interactive renderer of its kind for Autodesk®3ds Max®. This interactive raytracing technology changes the way in which 3D artists and visualization specialists approach the lighting and shading setup by enabling them to gain constant feedback.

Industry:Broadcast, interactive and print production

Application:3ds Max and Maya Autodesk

Challenges: Improve customer communication and production quality

Solution: AMD FireProTM V7900 professional graphics

Dell workstations

V-Ray RT render engine from CHAOS Group

Business impact: With reliable and speedy feedback quality is improved

Less time spent on test rendering, more on creative input

Immediate hardware upgrades with lower cost and less upheaval

“As a business we can use the time we save on test rendering to maximize our creative input so we offer our clients an ever-increasing quality of work at the same time as cutting timescales.” Keith Jeffery Head of Business Development, Taylor James

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AMD FIREPRO & TAYLORJAMES

Fantastic feedback in real-time “The combination of the AMD FirePro V7900 and V-Ray RT is very, very fast,” David comments. “We are handling large scale scenes and we get an extremely quick response when we manipulate data on screen. We can see alterations to glossiness, reflection or translucence without having to pause and go through the time-consuming rendering process. This is particularly apparent with stereo images that we have developed. The ability to see changes in the rendered form immediately gives us fantastic feedback to pass on to clients. As our clients become more familiar with the CGI process we can work with them live on a scene, present a choice of visualization and fine tune much more quickly.”

Keith continues, “Given the variety of different materials and shaders that we use, the V-Ray RT solution is a real bonus for us because the images we are producing demonstrate what we will achieve with full V-Ray. With this level of quality at the pre-production stage we have the opportunity to do real-time reviews with our clients before committing to the expense of final production render. As a business we can use the time we save on test rendering to maximize our creative input so we offer our clients an ever-increasing quality of work at the same time as cutting timescales.”

A M D F I R E P R O ™ V 7 9 0 0 P R O F E S S I O N A L G R A P H I C S

Future scalabilityWhilst delivering speed and performance right now, the combination of AMD™ FirePro professional graphics and V-Ray RT running on OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language) opens the door to future scalability. OpenCL™ enables the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of the graphics card to take on heavy computation workloads traditionally processed in the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of a workstation. Because AMD FirePro™ professional graphics products incorporate a unique AutoDetect technology the graphics driver settings are automatically configured to optimize performance as users call for computing power.

AMD FirePro™ V7900 Fast Facts 1280 Stream Processors

2GB GDDR5

160 GB/s memory bandwidth

AMD Eyefinity for four displays

4x DisplayPort 1.2

“We have been looking at GPU rendering for some time and so are evaluating the market,” says Keith. “Running programs only on the CPU limits performance whereas distributing the processing to the GPU magnifies computing resource. The price performance of GPU over CPU is quite substantial and we feel that the V7900 bundled into a machine gives a much more cost-effective solution than those from other competitors.”

Keith sees OpenCL™ developing as the standard language for real-time rendering and Taylor James plans to take advantage of the business benefits. “A GPU based rendering solution enables us to increase hardware performance without actually updating our base hardware. The more cards we put in the better performance we will get from V-RAY and the AMD FirePro V7900. The only limit is the number of cards we can fit.”