Qvisten Animation Builds Future-Proof Pipeline With Z By HP Workstations
Qvisten Animation was named after the attic the place its founders arrange store in Oslo, Norway, in 1994. Thirty years later, Qvisten’s studio house encompasses a state-of-the-art basis and 80 workers around the globe telling Nordic tales with a worldwide attain.
Qvisten chief expertise officer Raymond Kreppene, who joined the corporate in 2007, has been instrumental in guiding its technical evolution alongside animation trade developments, serving to to drive the corporate’s ongoing enlargement and success. He consistently experiments with new {hardware} and software program, in addition to rising expertise, comparable to synthetic intelligence (AI), real-time sport engines, and open requirements together with USD, to proceed pushing Qvisten’s capabilities ahead. Z by HP workstations type the spine of the studio’s infrastructure, with almost 80 machines in numerous configurations presently in use.

Most just lately, Kreppene started testing the HP Z6 G5 A desktop workstation offered by HP. Whereas the machine provides the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Professional processors with as much as 96 cores and as much as three high-end graphics playing cards, Kreppene opted for a 24-core processor, one NVIDIA RTX 4000 graphics card, and 128GB RAM for simulation and rendering.
“Know-how is altering sooner than ever; it looks like there’s one thing new and thrilling each week. We have to create a technical baseline in order that the investments we make right now are a part of the long run,” mentioned Kreppene. “The HP Z6 G5 A is tremendous responsive. One in all our character results artists elevated his render speeds by round 67-percent so he might nearly do material sims in actual time. The lighting group received comparable outcomes throughout testing and didn’t need to quit the machine. I needed to promise them that we’d be buying a number of Z6s for them after our exams had been completed.”
Increasing infrastructure
Qvisten creates award-winning, family-friendly animated content material with coronary heart and humor that appeals to a worldwide viewers. To attain this, it retains its pipeline on the sting of innovation and seeks out instruments that meet its particular wants. For instance, Kreppene is an enormous fan of Numerion Software program’s Carbon material simulation device and Autodesk Arnold for rendering. In allocating the corporate’s Z by HP workstations, he matches the machine specs to the precise artist wants.
“We tailor our machines in response to use,” Kreppene defined. “We discovered that HP Z4s have been nice for animation as a result of the CPU has such a excessive clock velocity, even with all of the calculation occurring with a personality rig, and we’ve been utilizing older HP Z8s for simulation and rendering, however will probably be swapping these for HP Z6s with the sooner AMD CPU.”

Superior {Hardware} Amplifies Creativity
At Qvisten, Kreppene frequently cycles in new Z by HP workstation fashions based mostly on capabilities and the wants of his artists. Apparently, he’s discovered that extra highly effective workstations don’t essentially result in sooner renders as a result of artists leverage the improved CPU and RAM to create extra complicated and better high quality work.
“Once I began in animation, most artists additionally needed to be technical,” Kreppene mentioned. “With right now’s user-friendly instruments, that’s not the case. The truth is, most Qvisten artists are artistic folks and not using a technical background, and it’s as much as the pipeline group to combine the technical and creative methods of working for them.”

Adopting new requirements
Together with guaranteeing Qvisten pipeline instruments are optimized, Kreppene retains an eye fixed on common trade developments. On account of widespread assist from main corporations within the media and leisure trade, Kreppene rebuilt the Qvisten pipeline across the USD open supply customary in 2023; he’s additionally monitoring how AI and machine studying (ML) are being built-in into artistic purposes.
“Requirements like USD allow us to undertake new software program rapidly and open doorways to NVIDIA’s Omniverse. It takes quite a bit to go from testing into full manufacturing, so we’re simply beginning to play with it, however we’re discovering some cool advantages and fascinating potential,” famous Kreppene. “We’re additionally intently monitoring developments in AI; we’re already seeing it in common use for purposes like denoising renders and upscaling. AI and ML are going to alter the we means full sure animation and vfx duties, however the fingers and eyes of artists will all the time be important to bringing our initiatives to life.”

Qvisten virtualized
To make sure Qvisten has the suitable sources and experience, it has applied strong work-from-anywhere capabilities utilizing HP distant entry expertise, which Kreppene notes has been essential for the studio.
“Our studio is changing into fairly massive, so we’d like to have the ability to entry expertise around the globe and join with artists remotely. Thankfully, we had been already utilizing HP ZCentral Distant Enhance when the pandemic hit and had been arrange for that state of affairs,” shared Kreppene. “Quickly, we’ll be shifting to HP Anyware, particularly with our new HP Z6s; we’re trying ahead to that.”

Continued development
In his ongoing quest for innovation, Kreppene goals to take a balanced method in how he implements new expertise. Whereas many artists are excited by getting upgraded workstations and software program, others favor to work in a predictable method.
“I attempt to not introduce too many new issues without delay. It’s essential to maintain evolving, however do it responsibly. We solely transfer ahead with expertise that’s battle-proven, and effectively documented. Generally that requires training and studying periods with the artists. There positively may be some frustration, however nearly everyone seems to be tremendous excited once they get a brand new machine and it’s a Z by HP laptop,” concluded Kreppene.
For extra details about Z by HP workstations, go to https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/workstation-pcs.html.