10 years ago it started to render frames in a real production: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/
Many major changes happened over that time, Afanasy became much better.
Lets remember the most significant architecture changes:
- Qt is used for GUI only. At first Afanasy was entirely written on Qt, so we needed to install lots of huge GUI libraries on each render node.
- JSON protocol. Very easy to communicate Afanasy. We do not need to compile af module for all needed Python versions any more.
- Web GUI. Browser gives us an ability to check farm without installing anything, we can do it just from a mobile phone.
- Server does not connect to clients. This was the first bottleneck for a bigger farms. When server connects to a big amount of clients it slows down. Now only clients connect to server.
- Server does not raise a thread for an each incoming connection. And this was the second bottleneck on a way to a bigger farms. Thread raising consumes much resources. Better to use threads pool (raise all needed threads once). Also you can configure server to use non-blocking IO (based on epoll facility so this is Linux only feature).
- Branches. You can tune farm resources allocation between departments/projects/assets.
This changes affected the project very much. I even want to say, that it is a completely another product than 10 years ago.
And Afanasy spreads more widely. From a few small studios with a local small farm to a bigger studios all over the world with hundreds of machines in a farm and in a cloud.
Many developers, TDs, render-wrangles, supervisors from different countries/studios contribute to this project.
Some of them write many things manually, some giving invaluable advises from their great experience, some even shared their in-house mature classes.
For a last 10 years working on the project we made it much-much better!
Many thanks for all this to all!
Afanasy anniversary this year!
Afanasy anniversary this year!
Timur Hairulin
CGRU 3.3.1, Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, MS Windows 10 (clients only).
CGRU 3.3.1, Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, MS Windows 10 (clients only).
Re: Afanasy anniversary this year!
This is a great project!!! Thank you for sharing!