Rendering complex computer animation can easily demand thousands of hours of compute time, a task generally relegated to racks and racks of submissive CPUs fondly referred to as Render Farms. In days of yore, the cost conscious production company would triple shift every computer in the facility, creating an overnight render farm out of people’s desktop computers. Interns, aka Render Wranglers (seriously – go check those old film credits, you’ll see…), would seek their big break in the film industry babysitting the machines each night. Generally the job involved walking around looking at screens to make sure everything was going well, and fixing things when they weren’t. A control-G beep would generally signal a frame had finished rendering and a new one was queuing up. It was satisfying to hear the occasional beep to know that progress was being made, but there were no modern dashboards showing all the machines at once, and no proactive notification of problems.

As technology evolved and better sound became an option, one of our competitors (and I’m ashamed I can’t remember who) made a brilliant move. Each time a frame rendered successfully, the machine would let out a contented “Mooooo.” If ever the program ran into an error, an authentic cowbell sound would clatter. With dozens of computers in a room, the wranglers were treated to the pastoral sound of happy cows until attention was requested.

I’ve always loved this idea. The use of two unobtrusive and complementary sounds to signal “good” and “bad” allows people in the area to be aware of positive progress as well as to be alerted of problems when necessary. The mooing exists as a comforting background noise, which can be consciously ignored. However, at any point in time one intuitively knows how much work is being done by the general “feeling” of the room.