Raimondo Della Calce, one of the most active Maya user in Italy and owner of ArtFive production studios, switched to Muster 5 for the Ceres beer commercial. Learn more about his experiences.

Greetings Raimondo, could you explain your position in ArtFive ?

I’m the owner and founder of the studio. I take care of animation and projects supervision in general, direction, and sometimes I also take care of the animation, rendering and lightning processes.

Could you explain your company working field and its objectives ? 

We make 3D character animations and visual effects. We’re actually working on the first Italian television 3D series, produced by RAI and Animabit. The series is named “Ondino”, it will be translated “Ripples” in English. We also just finished the production of a spot for one of the most famous brand of beer, Ceres, and for Nikon Italia. Our objectives? Create products with an high visual and expressive impact, we would like to become a high quality reference point for character animation in Italy and foreign countries.

Could you make a little short of your past experiences ?

From 1996 to 2003, I worked for several postproduction and animation companies based in Milan, Turin and Rome as an animator and graphic designer. In 1999, I met Bruno Dreossi, photo director of big talent, it has been a real mentor that teached me everything I actually know about direction and photography in cinema. Both decided to merge our different experiences in a 3D animation short: Heterogenic. Together with Fabio Dreossi (the son of Bruno) that wrote a funny but depth story and Antonio Calò that made the designs. After two intensive years of production, without any kind of external financing, with only 2 computers, we did it. The short has been projected in several festivals across the world winning several international prices. After one year, it has been purchased by Italia1, Canal+ and OnePlusOne. Heterogenic has been the starting point the gave me the right experiences to start an activity in the sector. I called it “ArtFive”. The name is born considering that 3D graphics is a big expressive tool only when it’s in the hand of an artist. ArtFive wants to bring to the computers the experience from five fundamentals arts: story telling, painting, sculpture, animation and film direction.

Could you tell us how you found Muster and why you choosed it ?

We decided to use Muster after testing several competitors. We’ve also interviewed several studios to understand what they actually used for distributed rendering. The main reasons are easy of use, features and not less important, the end price. Muster also easily supports Renderman, the render engine we use mostly.

Could you tell us what kind of benefits have you got using Muster ?

Muster gives use the ability to automatize the render process directly from the Maya interface. Once completing a job, we push the “Render with Muster” button, a .mel command that automatically queues the job itself in the Dispatcher. We can monitor what’s going on from any kind of PC, launch again renders that stuck or gives errors, and even create pools, group of computers assigned to the render process, so we can launch renders continuously on the renderfarm hosts, and we can use our working stations during the night hours with a single click. In the past, we did all those things manually, switching to Muster has been a relief.

Could you tell us what kind of benefits have you experienced upgrading to Muster 5?

Muster 5 is a major upgrade, we found some features we missed in the previous version apart from finding it a rock stable solution. The new database driven queue gives us the ability to write some custom submission adds on, combined with the power of the template engines, we are going to redesign our pipeline to include some custom post processing processes. This is going to result in several saved hours of work.

Thanks for you time, Raimondo, we wish you the best for your future works.