Founded in Silicon Valley with R&D headquartered in Taipei, Reallusion develops 2D and 3D animation software for a global audience. Specializing in real-time cinematic animations, Reallusion tools support everything from CG animation, to film industry, game development, virtual production, television network, AEC simulations and more.

The problems
When Reallusion launched its Character Creator (CC) Omniverse Connector tool in April 2021, it empowered creators of all skill levels to efficiently create digital humans for any type of project. Reallusion planned to enhance the pipeline with tools for full character performance with powerful facial and body controls, through the launch of its latest-generation iClone 8 and CC4 products at NVIDIA GTC. Working on a tight deadline Reallusion turned to a brand it knew had the products and expertise to deliver the project on time – ASUS.

The solution
“ASUS is one of the market-leading partners to offer NVIDIA® RTX series graphics cards. The company has long been the first choice for many animation creators and production companies drawn by its product quality and stability – plus the high-level recommendation of NVIDIA,” explained Elvis Huang, the Head of Innovation from Reallusion “In the past, we only had workstations with a single graphics card. However, for this GTC project we chose an ASUS ESC4000-E10 GPU server. With two NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics cards configured, the computing performance and rendering efficiency vastly improved.”

ASUS ESC4000-E10 is an NVIDIA-certified GPU server with a 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor to support up to four dual-slot GPUs, 16 DIMMs, eight NVMe, and four M.2 slots – so it’s primed for the huge storage demands and faster transfer speeds required in animation production. It features one OCP 3.0 network interface card to deliver high-throughput speeds of up to 200 Gbps with low latency. ESC4000-E10 has been a popular choice with animation companies around the world since it launched in 2021, and it is now helping Reallusion achieve its aims.

“Beyond the powerful hardware, ASUS has provided us with real-time technical support to quickly complete the construction of iClone 8 and Character Creator 4. We appreciate all the support given, and look forward to more collaborations in the future.”

- Elvis Huang, the Head of Innovation from Reallusion

Reallusion’s iClone 8 and Character Creator 4 are great tools for real-time character animation and character design. iClone 8 is a massive innovation for motion creation and editing. Its new Motion Director system debuts game player controls to pilot characters, apply motion triggers and dynamic cameras to direct scenes in real-time. iClone’s new motion editing with automatic blending tools, motion layer editor, footstep locking, and visual upgrade are ready to power your next high-level production. At the same time, Character Creator 4 completes the path for all new characters to be created and readied for animation. Custom character creation is made simple with the ability to import and rapidly set up a character for face and body animation. Advanced facial performances are introduced for the next level of realism – all powered by ASUS server technology.

The result
Implemented by Reallusion, the ASUS server technology has proved to be a powerhouse rendering solution. As an example, it reduced the rendering time of one video from 18 hours to 4 hours only – an overall performance of 4.5X compared to Reallusion’s previous solution. With the help of ASUS servers and support, Reallusion met its deadline for 2022 NVIDIA GTC. With the success of this project, the company is now busy planning further projects that will rely on ASUS technology – and ASUS is once more ready to help.