With great compute power: Rendering ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ on Google Cloud

“This was remarkable,” said Michael Perdew, a VFX producer at Luma Pictures. Initially, Luma didn’t think the cloud would be a good fit for the latest Spider-Man. “The big technical challenge here was that both of these characters were simulations,” he said. Historically, simulations took too much CPU, bandwidth, and disk space to be rendered in a time- or cost-effective manner outside of a local compute farm. Syncing terabytes of cache data from on-premises to the cloud can take several hours if you have limited bandwidth. In addition, Luma hadn’t yet found a cloud-based file system that could support the massive compute clusters you need to render simulations.

But this was a big job, and “we had to find a way to render more than our local farms could handle,” Perdew said. So they put their heads together and developed a workflow to make it work in the cloud.

As it turned out, the cloud turned out to be the perfect place for this project–specifically for Cyclone. In Google Cloud, Luma leveraged Compute Engine custom images with 96-cores and 128 GB of RAM, and paired them with a high-performance ZFS file system. Using up to 15,000 vCPUs, Luma could render shots of the cloud monster in as little as 90 minutes–compared with the 7 or 8 hours it would take on their local render farm. Time saved rendering in the cloud more than made up for time spent syncing data to Google Cloud. “We came out way ahead, actually,” Perdew said.