What is a credit worth?

[bobweb]

Hello Chaosgroup,

I have read through the FAQ and tried a forum search, but there seems to be no information about what I get for a credit. So it is impossible to calculate the costs for a project and see whether cloud rendering is an option for the budget. Have I missed something and is there any insight on this somewhere?
The only thing I have found is a two year old thread saying it is "linked to a certain amount of compute time", but what is a certain amount? A second, a year? On what hardware?
I would rather not buy credits as long as there is no hint on what it is actually worth. I totally understand that this can only be estimated, but for now I do not even know if an image, that takes e. g. 1 hour with a certain CPU locally, will cost 1 $ or 1.000.000 $ in the cloud...

Thanks,
Bob

[vladie]

Hi Bob,

You are correct that this information is important and is missing currently. We plan to implement a solution that will help users get a quote in credits for their scenes after benchmarking their local render machine using V-Ray Benchmark. We'll keep you updated about our progress there.

Meanwhile I'd like to suggest to you these workflows that I hope will help you. If you are speaking about a still image, currently the best way to estimate its cost is to render a smaller (as a resolution) image first to see whether everything renders as expected and get an idea about the cost. Of course the dependence between this small resolution and the production resolution is not linear so you should add at least 30-40% on top of the calculation to be on the safe side. But generally the best predictions can be made after gaining experience by rendering several images as the rendering process depends a lot on what the scene is, the light source, the camera position, and all the settings.

If you are speaking about an animation, the best way is first to render the animation with production quality using the frame step option (render every n-th frame, where, for example, "n" can be 10). This way you will be able to calculate the average cost and time per frame based on a representative sample from your animation. Then if you are satisfied with the results, you can clone the job and just render the missing frames as the first batch of frames should work for you (they are rendered with production quality).

We also have these sample scenes and their cost in credits after being rendered in Chaos Cloud. But we are in the process of updating them as we have upgraded the rendering hardware and we want to render them with V-Ray 5. So please have this in mind when using them for reference: https://www.chaosgroup.com/cloud/scenes

Best regards,
Vladie

[bobweb]

Hello Vladie,

thanks for the quick response, althugh I am a little astonished, to be frank. I guess, you calculate credits all the time on your servers. Can't you just tell us, how this is done? The suggested workflows all imply that I first have to buy testing credits (besides the first free ones of course) without knowing, what I get for it. I understand that this is probably the most reliable way to know the cost, but it is still rather unsatisfying to basically pay for a quote - maybe just to realise it is too expensive anyway. Well, we will just have to wait, I guess.

Thanks,
Bob

[vladie]

Hi Bob,

Totally agree with you that it is very difficult to work without being able to estimate the cost. The 20 free trial credits are exactly for this but if they are not enough you can always contact us in Support to discuss your case. We'll be happy to help.

I'd like also to ask you for opinion about the possible solution that we are building now - a tool to estimate Credit usage. The upcoming tool will be able to tell you what the approximate Cloud Credit cost will be for any V-Ray rendering you do on your own machine. This estimation will all happen without any cloud rendering costs. You will just need to install the V-Ray Benchmark tool, benchmark your local render machine and give us the local render time for the scene you want to render in Chaos Cloud. Then we'll compare your local machine's V-Ray score with the score of the currently available cloud machines and will do the math using the local render time to give you the Chaos Cloud cost for rendering the scene. Please let me know what you think.

Bests,
Vladie

[bobweb]

Hi Vladie,

sounds great and I guess this could be close enough to estimate the costs. I have the V-Ray benchmark installed anyway to compare the machines I have here, so at least for me this would not be an obstacle at all. Please post it here, when your tool is ready.

Thanks,
Bob

[manishpaul_simon]

I guess you guys decided to not show the credits needed to render correct? vladie hope you can share a detailed blog on how Chaos Cloud works and the machine specifics. That way, it'll be easier for us to calculate the Chaos Credits. I'm a big fan of remote working and chaos cloud can definitely help me achieve that. Otherwise, I will have to endup carrying my big system everywhere, which is not too pleasant. If Chaos Cloud can be more robust with more options, I'll be glad to start my remote working journey & travel

[vladie]

Hi manishpaul_simon ,

You are right that I owe you a follow-up here. We did a lot of tests and prepared the calculator feature on staging. But the results were inconclusive or at least based on our criteria - to give close to 80-90% correct results in all cases (we were testing still images). Some of the results were off by 50% and we decided that it's not worth giving the Chaos Cloud clients something which might mislead them and create false expectations. Meanwhile we updated the Sample Scenes page - gave more details about the settings used, besides the cost, and the scenes with the respective settings available for download and rendering locally. We are also preparing a more thorough guide how to use the sample scenes in order to learn Chaos Cloud, similar to the guide we have for animations.

With respect to the current hardware that we use in Chaos Cloud, we are hesitant to share specifics as we are constantly testing for better performing configurations and might change them. But we always do that with the goal to give better performance for the Chaos Cloud clients on a better price or at least the same price. Also please have in mind that the credit cost is not just for rendering but includes additional services as provisioning the render machine, loading the scene on the render machine, calculating LC, generating the final outputs, closing V-Ray, etc. Nevertheless I can share with you that for still images we currently use 96 cores of the N2D machines. The RAM memory varies between 128 and 256 GB. But this might change again soon

Best regards,
Vladie

[manishpaul_simon]

Thanks a lot Vladie! Thes sample scenes definitely help! Hope you can add more examples. Or a database where user renders are shared and how much credits are used. (obviously after taking permission from the user of course - or maybe they could just have an option if they wish to share their cloud renders along with how many credits they used) It will definitely help us. Thanks