At the IBC Conference and Exhibition in Amsterdam, visitors had a chance to experience an artist-centered cloud-based virtual production workflow, leveraging the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 connected to a Windows virtual workstation hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This solution represents a first-of-its-kind, proving that artists working with creative pen technology can continue to use the tools they prefer and are most comfortable with, even as creative workloads move to the cloud.
Cloud-based virtual production workflows have benefits for artists and studios alike. While artists get to use the latest NVIDIA RTX-capable GPU offerings and slash iteration times by leveraging vast on-demand GCP render resources, studios have gains too. Increased staff flexibility and access to remote talent facilitates collaboration, along with having the enhanced security benefit of centralizing assets away from deskside endpoints.
Making this remote experience look and behave like a local workstation required a tight-knit collaboration between Google Cloud, Wacom, NVIDIA, and Teradici. Check out the video for yourself to see how the combined solution delivers a smooth, high-fidelity experience.
Artists connect to their virtual workstations using PCoIP Zero Clients and Teradici Cloud Access Software, interacting with their applications via the Wacom Cintiq Pro. The solution leverages the PCoIP protocol, along with NVIDIA RTX-capable GPUs to provide immediate visual feedback to the user. This is particularly critical on the Cintiq platform, which requires frictionless low latency performance with high resolution. In the IBC demonstration, a Windows virtual workstation with an NVIDIA T4 GPU hosted on GCP is tightly integrated with Teradici Cloud Access Software to deliver a user experience that’s indistinguishable from a local workstation. Now creative professionals can use virtual workstations and take on the biggest visualization challenges for immersive, interactive, photorealistic environments.
Build a Virtual Workstation with Google Cloud
Firms in media & entertainment, manufacturing, and oil & gas have traditionally created most of their content with on-prem infrastructure, generating 2D and 3D assets on expensive workstations they either own or rent. Firms employed this approach for cost and process efficiencies, content security, and control.