After extensive competitive evaluation, the award-winning entertainment studio W!LDBRAIN chose Qube! as their render management platform. Qube! will manage the company’s increased pipeline complexity for the company’s animated television, film and commercials projects. Founded in 1994, W!LDBRAIN develops and produces unique and compelling content across the media spectrum. Powered by its distinctive pool of talented animators and directors and renowned for blending traditional animation methods with state-of-the-art computer graphics, the studio and its artists have consistently won top industry awards.

The company has produced an exceptional slate of original work in television, including the top-rated animated series Higglytown Heroes airing daily on Disney Channel and the highly-anticipated new Nick Jr. series Yo Gabba Gabba!. In film, the studio has garnered numerous awards including an Annie for its computer graphics short (CG) Hubert’s Brain and currently has a number of film projects in development. W!LDBRAIN also is one of the nation’s foremost producers of animated commercials – reinvigorating classic brands and developing cutting-edge spots for such leading companies as The Coca-Cola Company, Honda, Kraft and Nike. In addition, the company creates and distributes collectible merchandise through its subsidiary Kidrobot, a premier retailer of limited-edition art toys, apparel and accessories.

As W!LDBRAIN’s Chief Technology Officer, Steve Maggioncalda ensures that the studio is scaleable in all directions – including network throughput, data storage and render farm management. According to Maggioncalda, Qube! is a high-end CG application with many benefits and fits in perfectly with the company’s needs. One benefit is the flexible license model, where Qube! workers are able to run on every computer in the studio and are dynamically licensed as needed – a very flexible, cost effective topology. As a result, W!LDBRAIN artists are able to avoid licensing complications. The Qube! Supervisor also makes it easy to keep track of render licenses through Global Resource Management, allowing jobs to be queued and processed more proactively. With other queuing solutions, it’s not an easy task getting FlexLM, spm and other software licensing managers integrated with the render management queue without encountering race conditions.

The total cost of ownership is also lower with Qube! because it quickly establishes a solid core and with open APIs, the studio has all of the inroads to build on top of it. As Qube! is MySQL™- based, the open APIs in Perl, Python and C++ gives artists the tools to address all of the functionality they need. The completely customizable Qube! GUI, written in Phython, allows the artists to tweak it to their specific needs and Qube!’s consistency across all platforms is yet another bonus.

“Qube! delivered the extra granularity and flexibility that W!LDBRAIN was looking for in a render management system,” said Maggioncalda. “The way Qube! breaks down jobs into subjobs and provides hooks to grab other information makes custom development at all levels very attainable – including customized priorities and queuing algorithms. W!LDBRAIN’s everchanging production pipeline requires this type of functionality.”

The artists at W!LDBRAIN also appreciate that PipelineFX develops interfaces inside the applications they use and not just around them. Additionally, PipelineFX supports the same OS platforms that Autodesk® supports. Another important factor in making Qube! W!LDBRAIN’s render farm management choice is the quality technical support provided by PipelineFX’s technical experts, who also have first-hand knowledge of CG applications.

Qube! is by design a platform for render farm management. PipelineFX ships inapplication submission interfaces for all the major digital media programs and an easy-to-use artist GUI so it can be used right out of the box. Qube! also comes with crossplatform support, advanced capabilities, an event-driven queuing model, and database functionality so that studios can quickly roll out their production pipeline and continue to scale into the future.

For more information on Qube! andPipelineFX, visit www.pipelinefx.com

Contact Information

W!LDBRAIN

660 Alabama Street
San Francisco, CA,
USA

tele: 415.553.8000
fax: 415.553.8009
www.wildbrain.com