Award-winning DUX Soft SPARX™ software is a tool designed to facilitate those in the film, television, game development, and other industries who desire to manage their render farm or computing center. SPARX™ has a unique and robust architecture for managing the rendering and computing needs of various industries. The tool can be customized to create effective workflows for computation needs. SPARX™ runs on Sun Grid Engine – which is a highly scalable distributed resource management (DRM) system that allows administrators to accurately model compute resources and business policies in order to achieve optimum utilization of resources and a higher level of productivity for users. SPARX™ is well known for the reliability, open architecture, wide range of supported platforms, and effective data mining.
High Performance Rendering™
With SPARX™ along with Cluster computing, you get a highly scalable DRM system. The tool outwits the other job schedulers with this powerful feature of efficient load management on the compute nodes. A unified interface provides easy and consistent access to the resource utilization of the compute nodes.
Productivity-Enhancing Features
The special features incorporated in the tool gives a combination of performance and productivity enhancement. The file analysis, selective render layers for efficient scene management gives you the flexibility to work the way you want.
Comprehensive Database
SPARX™ stores all the information like render logs, user logs, status of jobs in a strong database for more efficient render wrangling and data mining. This database becomes a permanent record of the render history.
Variety of tools supported
SPARX™ supports a wide range of tools. The tools can be quickly integrated with SPARX™. These are not only the tools used in Animation, Visual EFX and Gaming but also used in other compute intensive industries like CAE, Bio Engineering, Weather Research etc.,
Efficient Integration
SPARX™ is currently integrated in the software tools like Autodesk® Maya for immediate submission of jobs to the render-farm. With the help of the development team at DUX Soft, SPARX™ can be integrated into any application
SPARX™ - Empowering the Graphics Industry worldwide to excel through High Performance Rendering™
SPARX™ has entered the market with its first module for Render Farm Management through grid computing, deployed as an underlying platform for DUX Soft’s Remote Render facility – RenderArm – http://www.renderarm.com/sparx. It can also be deployed to manage internal Render Farms or Data Centers through grid computing.
1. Interface
SPARX™ has a unique web interface. It is completely platform/Operating System independent. The interface is very simple that it can even be loaded on mobile phone.
2. User friendly
SPARX™ user friendly interface resembles the explorer like usage. The file selection and execution is file extension sensitive, for example: if the file is .ma/.mb/.max the application specific forms are generated when file is selected for rendering.
3. Job scheduling
SPARX™ has flexible job priority range from 1 – 20. It has the option for holding/pausing a job. SPARX™ adds on options for job resubmitting and frame resubmitting.
4. Softwares supported
SPARX™ has a long list of supported softwares like,
MAYA, 3dsMAX, After Effects, Mayaman, AIR, 3delight, Renderman, Digital Fusion, Toxic, Shake, Nuke, Blender, Cinema 4D, Realflow, Combustion, XSI. Shave and a Hair cut RIB generation.
5. Secured
SPARX™ is ssl certified and also has 128-bit encryption providing high level of security. SPARX™ has the administrator login which has full access to the settings of SPARX™.
6. Error logs
The error logs can be used for data mining of the completed renders. The logs have details of user, number of files rendered, start – end time of each file, total frames rendered for each job, frames rendered on specific render server, total time taken to render each frame, memory utilized by each job or frame, etc.,
7. Job monitoring
The interface shows the progress of each job submitted for rendering, automatically. The job can be submitted by allocating required number of cores for the job.
8. Cost Saving
SPARX™ is offered at a very low cost and is accessible to everyone. SPARX™ offers a unique power saving feature, which turns off the render servers that are not used for rendering. SPARX™ integrates this feature along with Wake-On-LAN for ready startup of severs when there is a requirement for render.
9. Thumbnails – preview
SPARX™ interface has the preview of the renders completed which helps the users to view the output without downloading the images to their machines.
10. File Analysis
SPARX™ offers a unique file analysis feature which lists out the missing textures/references of a file that is submitted for rendering. This allows the user to fix the issues before the actual renders begin.
11. Integration with applications
SPARX™ is currently developed as a plug-in for MAYA currently. This plug-in can be used for submitting jobs from within MAYA. Similar plug-ins’ are being developed for various leading media softwares, with the help of the feedback from SPARX™ user community.
12. Render Layers
SPARX™ has an add-on feature for MAYA rendering where the user can select the render layers to be rendered. Also the user can specify whether to render those layers as separate jobs or as a single job.
13. Job Submission
SPARX™ submission form is dynamically created when the particular job is selected. The form also gets filled up automatically with just a click.
14. Application Mobility
• Reference file rendering.
• Can move files from one location to another.
1. File Analysis:
The scene file submitted for the render is analyzed automatically and checks if there are any missing references and texture maps for the specific render.
“The user can save a lot of time and effort by performing a check even before submitting the job for render”
2. Selective Render Layer & Camera Rendering:
The render layers and cameras that are present in the scene are automatically parsed and listed to the user to select the required layers for rendering. “The user can select the render layers to be rendered without re-opening the file. The render layers can also be submitted as separate jobs for render to the renderfarm”
3. Thumbnail Preview:
The rendered images can be previewed in real time by just dragging the mouse over the rendered image for a real time preview. “Check the rendered images instantly without spending time for downloading the images from the remote render facility”
4. Distributed Shave – RIB Generation:
The rib generation for shave and a haircut1 can be generated on a render-farm using “ShaveRib” created by DUX Soft. The tool can be used for both serial and parallel RIB generation. This tool saves a lot of time and effort when compared to the standard method of generating shave ribs on a single machine.
Shave and a haircut1 - Shave and a Haircut is a copyright of Joe Alter Inc
