Top Speed Visualisation with V-Ray – Featuring PriestmanGoode

PriestmanGoode delivers design and brand experiences for a host of leading international companies. The Visualisation team have worked for some of the biggest aviation brands, rail networks, cruise ships, and products, helping clients with the initial concept through to design development.

YellowDog interviewed Rob Walsh, Head of Visualisation at PriestmanGoode to learn how it uses the YellowDog Platform with V-Ray, to meet the demanding needs of its clients.

The Personal Touch

Over the past several years, the Visualisation team at PriestmanGoode have found themselves spending more and more direct time with clients to execute their vision and meet their expectations. This has created a greater demand for high-quality renders, to successfully convey a strong visual identity from the start.

These expectations are leading to more render-intensive projects that can be hard to meet with on-premise infrastructure alone.

Making the Impossible, Possible

While PriestmanGoode has a render farm in the studio, which it uses for all of its development renders and general day-to-day still images, the company was looking for a cloud solution to ensure it had that extra capacity needed to deliver the intensive and significant customer projects.

The consultancy selected YellowDog for two reasons: speed and support.

The scalability of the YellowDog Platform enables the company to make the impossible, possible. PriestmanGoode can promise high-quality renders for important clients and know that those will be reliably delivered by YellowDog.

Alongside speed, it was also important to the team that it was supported by the cloud provider it worked with. The level of help received from YellowDog, in comparison to other render farms, was really compelling.

According to Rob, “It is just better: we have a dedicated account manager whose job it is to help me, not just close a support ticket. If I have a question, need a favour, or really need to crank up the speed, not only do I know that the Platform is built for high performance, but I know I can do it with a quick phone call or email to someone that I know and trust.”

Is Cloud Rendering Value for Money?

With YellowDog, PriestmanGoode can lock in a reduced rate for powerful 72-thread CPU machines. The company provides a fixed monthly payment, so the costs are spread evenly throughout the year – irrespective of peaks and troughs in usage. Ultimately, the company knows exactly how many machines it gets, how many hours of rendering it can use, and how powerful every machine is, so it has total clarity on available compute.

On the pricing plan, Rob says, “For me, this flexibility is priceless. Not only do you access fast render times, you also pay for the luxury of not having to spend time explaining cash flow to the accounts department when you’re in the middle of a big project.

Before YellowDog, we’ve just loaded our credit card details onto a website and burned through whatever the rendering cost and hoped that it would be fast enough and good enough – sometimes this worked out well, sometimes it didn’t.

With YellowDog, we can now accommodate those famous last minute client changes without having to be on a conference call saying: ‘Yes we can, but that will take 4 days to re-render!’”

The performance offered by the YellowDog Platform and the transparent pricing model enables PriestmanGoode to constantly enhance the brand experiences it delivers for leading international brands.