Thinkbox Software is one of those companies you may not have heard of, but have definitely seen their work.
If you haven’t been using it for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) or product design, you might recognize the software’s handiwork, which has been used in many different projects, including commercials, music videos, games and films such and Thor and Transformers.
The technology is also used in the CAD/CAM world by engineers and non-clinical medical visualization industries to create, visualize and edit massive data sets, such as microscopic cells and city streets. Typical users of Thinkbox Software engage in complex and creative work that requires computationally intensive workflows, such as particle rendering.
Thinkbox Software was founded in 2010 by Chris Bond with the express intent of bringing new visualization tools and computer resource management to those who perform high-powered computing tasks on a daily basis.
Thinkbox Software is a natural extension of Bond’s earlier work. He launched a company called Frantic Films in 1997, which focused on remote VFX workflows. In 2007, the technology and VFX parts of Frantic Films were sold to Prime Focus, where he served as president and worked on Avatar as the VFX supervisor, and then Bond started The Secret Service, a private consulting firm. In 2010, after acquiring the same technology he created and worked on in 1997, Bond formed Thinkbox Software.
Thinkbox has a variety of products, such as:
Deadline
Thinkbox Software recently announced the launch of Deadline 8, a tool that allows users to manage complex combinations of local and cloud-based resources in the form of an administration and compute management toolkit. Available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X based render farms, it also has a wide range of management options for large and small compute clusters and support for 70-plus content creation applications.
Krakatoa
This toolkit is used for volumetric particle rendering, manipulation and management and is highly optimized for 64-bit computing. With it, users can render millions to billions of particles, and utilize a pipeline that organizes different tasks, such as transforming, acquiring, caching, shading and rendering particle data to represent natural phenomena like fog, smoke, mist, etc.
Sequoia
This stand-alone app is used for point cloud processing and meshing, optimized for modern multi-processing computers in mind. User interaction and data processing are managed asynchronously to keep interactivity levels intact and workflow uninterrupted during heavy calculations. You can work on multiple documents at the same time, and meshing calculations are cached automatically for later access by specifying the same parameters. Sequoia also has out-of-core processing if (and when) your system memory can’t handle or load a given data set at one time.
Recently, Thinkbox Software made an interesting move by introducing on-demand licensing for Deadline, Krakatoa and Sequoia as well as third-party apps like Chaos Group’s V-Ray and The Foundry’s NUKE and KATANA.
For the month of May, Thinkbox Software is providing free licensing hours of Deadline, NUKE, KATANA and V-Ray. The hours can be used for on-premise or cloud-based rendering and are only available until 12am PDT, June 1, 2016.
If you read this and want to jump on it, email sales@thinkboxsoftware.com or call 1-866-419-0283.