Google announced that it has acquired Zync, which makes Zync Render, a visual effects cloud rendering technology that was used on movies like Star Trek Into Darkness and Looper.

The Zync team will join the Google Cloud Platform team.

“Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes,” says Google product manager Belwadi Srikanth. “Many studios, however, don’t have the resources or desire to create an in-house rendering farm, or they need to burst past their existing capacity.”

“Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs,” Srikanth adds. “For example, with per-minute billing studios aren’t trapped into paying for unused capacity when their rendering needs don’t fit in perfect hour increments.”

A message on the Zync Render site says:

Since its inception at visual effects studio ZERO VFX, nearly 5 years ago, ZYNC was designed to not only leverage the benefits and flexibilities inherent in cloud computing but to offer this in a user-friendly package. Pairing this history with the scale and reliability of Google Cloud Platform will help us offer an even better service to our customers – including more scalability, more host packages and better pricing (including per-minute billing). With a friction-free, affordable, and elastic rendering solution, visual designers and artists in the industry can continue to do their best work.

Yes, we are excited, and yes, great things are coming. But we most especially want to thank our customers, our partners in the VFX software industry, and our phenomenal team for getting us to where we are today. Our service will be back and better than ever on Google Cloud Platform.

Google says it will have more details about its plans for Zync Render in the coming months. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image via YouTube