Google enters the world of scalable Cloud Rendering with Zync acquisition

Google this month has acquired rather young render farm service provider ZYNC for its Google Cloud Platform. The terms of the deal where not disclosed.

ZYNC was birthed about five years ago from ZERO VFX, a visual effects studio located in Boston and led by VFX supervisor Sean Devereaux. The company has been involved in about a dozen feature films, including hits like Flight, American Hustle, Looper and more, among other visual effects work.

The ZYNC platform at the time of the acquisition supports Maya (versions 2012 – 2014), Nuke 6+, V-Ray for Maya, Mental Ray Standalone, and Pixar’s Arnold for Maya. Plugins from The Foundry and GenArts Sapphire are also supported. According to the website the pairing of ZYNC with the Google Cloud Platform will bring its customers even more user-friendly packages, per minute pricing, greater scalability and reliability, and more host packages to send render jobs to.

01 – An image from a YouTube demo of the ZYNC rendering platform.

ZYNC customers get served a scalable compute, licensing, storage and data transfer package all in a lightweight installable application. The company’s native plugins allow users to kick renders off from directly within their supported hosted applications.

The company’s forward-facing web-based management tools allow constant monitoring of render jobs in real time. To learn more about ZYNC visit them here.

Architosh Analysis

This is an interesting development from Google but not one entirely surprising. With this acquisition Google’s Cloud Platform could begin to rival Amazon’s Web Services, which have available configurations which feature grid-based Nvidia GPUs via its G2 Elastic Cloud. Autodesk too has partnered with both Nvidia and Amazon on bring many of its M&E (media and entertainment) software solutions to the cloud. Google has said the aim is to bring “studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs.”