Case Study: Milk VFX renders 170 fluid-simulation shots in 6 weeks with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Thinkbox Deadline

Milk Renders 170 Fluid-Simulation Shots in 6 Weeks Using AWS Thinkbox Deadline

Milk is a London-based, Academy Award– and BAFTA-winning VFX studio that was the principal vendor on the film Adrift. Faced with the daunting task of producing 170 fluid-simulation ocean and storm shots—including a 62 TB, 3,000-frame “pitchpole” sequence—Milk had to render massive, highly detailed water sims on a six-week schedule, with average daily needs of ~80,000 CPU cores and peaks up to 132,000.

Milk met the challenge by extending its Houdini pipeline with custom scripts and using AWS Thinkbox Deadline together with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to render Mantra jobs in the cloud. The team simulated locally, submitted jobs without learning new tools, and scaled instantly to thousands of nodes; the result was all 170 shots delivered in six weeks, rapid iteration, efficient pay-as-you-go compute, and the ability for the studio to take on far larger projects than its on‑premises capacity would allow.

Milk VFX

Dave Goodbourn

Head of Systems