Recently Ben Houston, posted a story in his blog about how he co-created the Deadline render manager in the early 2000s. His story, as told on his blog, is a fascinating blend of innovation, simplicity, and the sheer will to make things work.
It all began with an email from Jason Cobill, an old friend working at Frantic Films, a Canadian visual effects studio. Ben developed a 2D implementation in just three days. By January 2003—only five months in—he had a 3D fluid solver up and running and even presented a short paper at SIGGRAPH.
Things were moving fast, but so were the challenges.
At Frantic Films, fluid simulations were taking days to process. While waiting for renders to finish, Ben created a simple distributed scheduler, whimsically named “Cloud.”
It was a no-frills solution that allowed idle office machines to pitch in and share the computational load.
Meanwhile, the studio was struggling with a different crisis: their render farm. Autodesk Backburner, the software managing their 60-machine setup, was an unreliable during that time It crashed so often
that an unlucky staffer was stuck on night duty just to restart the server when it inevitably failed. No server babysitter? No morning renders. Cue missed deadlines and plenty of frustration.
The Birth of Deadline
In early 2003, they adapted Ben’s Cloud scheduler into a render farm manager ,Studio head Chris Bond gave the green light, and the team divided tasks.
Mark Wiebe tackled plugins for Maya and 3ds Max, Bobo Petrov handled the 3ds Max submission interface, and Ben worked on the swarm scheduler, user interface, and worker nodes.
By Observing Backburner’s failures, Ben realized centralized servers were a single point of failure. Instead, they used the Windows file system as a makeshift database.
File renames handled locking, timestamps tracked health checks, and workers managed orphaned jobs autonomously.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked like a charm. Within weeks, Deadline was up and running at Frantic Films. Night shift server babysitting? Officially retired.
Deadline’s first external test came thanks to Chris Bond, who secured Blizzard Entertainment as a client. They needed a render manager for World of Warcraft cinematics, and Deadline delivered—though not without some early hiccups.
The reward? A glowing endorsement and a credit in the game’s release.
By spring 2004, Deadline was in beta, tested by over 100 VFX studios and artists. Their feedback helped fine-tune the tool for its SIGGRAPH launch later that year. Ben, wearing both marketing and sales hats, personally secured the first wave of customers, including the well-known Computer Cafe VFX studio in LA.
Eventually, Amazon snapped it up, seeing its potential for cloud rendering. For Ben, the real takeaway? Sometimes the biggest wins come from fixing the stuff that’s already broken around you.
