Open-Source Render Manager from Sony & Google

Google Cloud and Sony have recently teamed up to work on OpenCue, a new open-source render manager for VFX and animation. It is stated that OpenCue is based on Cue 3, the internal queuing system developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks over the last 15 years. It is also said that the system has been scaled to over 150,000 cores shared between Sony’s own on-premise data center and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for recent projects. Then, two teams decided that it should be open-sourced and renamed OpenCue.

“Sony’s strong history of developing software tools has made this an ideal partnership,” pointed out Todd Prives, GCP product manager, media & entertainment, in a blog post announcing the OpenCue release. “Sony has developed and contributed to industry standard software packages such as OpenColorIO and Alembic, which are now critical pieces in the pipeline of hundreds of studios worldwide for the daily creation of content that we view on all devices, be it at the movies, on television or on mobile devices.

OpenCue is said to incorporate a number of widely used open-source technologies, such as the Python programming language and the Postgres relational database. The system features “Cuebot, a management utility that can run in the background on a workstation or in a server cluster for higher availability; CueGUI, a graphical user interface for monitoring and managing jobs; CueSubmit, a PySide2 app for submitting render jobs that can run as a plug-in for applications including Autodesk Maya and Foundry Nuke; and RQD, a software daemon required on all OpenCue rendering hosts,” according to Studio Daily.

You can now get OpenCue’s source code and executables from a GitHub repository.