Bucket or Progressive for Chaos Cloud?

[david_ng]

I was wondering if these modes make a difference in cost (of course) in using Chaos Cloud for animations. I have a fairly limited budget and anything that I can optimize is needed

[vladie]

Hi david_ng,

For testing purposes the progressive mode is preferable as you can set render time as a completion criteria. You can also live preview the render progress in Chaos Cloud and pause or stop the render if you are satisfied with the result or observe a problem, and don't want to waste more credits. The Bucket mode is preferred for final production rendering. This is briefly speaking but there are more pros and cons to both approaches.

Bests,
Vladie

[seandunderdale]

If we use progressive mode for final renders, is it advisable to put in a max render time? Does the job get sent to machines of varying speeds which would result in renders of mixed quality in the end? Ive got shots here I need to render that I need to render that look fine on my 3990x for a 10 minute render. I need to re-render because of some updates, and the deadline is soon, hence looking at farm options. If I set my render time to be 15mins max, will all my frames come back looking consistent?

[doychin_atanasov]

Frames will be rendered on machines which will be exactly the same. So if generally the time deadline is a good enough strategy for a single machine on your scene then it should be just as good in Chaos Cloud. At least I don't see a flaw in this logic.

[seandunderdale]

ok that sounds reassuring. Is there a way to know if the machines are a higher or lower spec? Im test rendering on a 3990x for example, so my settings would need to be different if the cpus on any farm are 2990x or intels. Is there a way of knowing that? Ive seen some which offer a tiered service so a low tier has 44 threads, a top tier has 176 threads. That way Id know I was submitting to machines as good, or faster than the machine I test on.

[doychin_atanasov]

Comparing machine performance is hard and depends on the scene in question. I wouldn't try to do that. What I could advise you instead is to submit a single frame of the animation to the Cloud and make judgement for your particular case when you see the results. Luckily Chaos Cloud is optimized for interactive work so after the first submission the next uploads for the same project will probably be extremely fast. This way you could rapidly try different settings.

Edit: another way to get a feeling of the Cloud machine's performance which does not require you to submit scenes is to take a look at the example scenes.