Chaos Cloud was a very expensive mistake.

[RobT614]

Full discloser...im writing this with only 6 hours of sleep in the last 3 days......but im pretty disappointed with the execution of the render farm. I did participate in the beta testing awhile back, and wanted to see how the Chaos Cloud performed on a real project. About 30% of the job submitted with no issues. fast upload, no errors, appropriate render times and fees...but then, I had a job get stuck in limbo and would not start rendering, but it was more than eager to gobble up about 550 credits while waiting. Thus I almost ran out of credits and had to buy more to keep the job alive. Well, the second time it did that my credits went to zero, and it paused my 900 frame animation sequence (after waiting 3.5 hours), and then caused it to error out. No way to just restart, I almost lost it.....That in turn made me miss my deadline. All this with absolutely no way to contact a living sole at Chaos. I'm pretty sure I lost about $1000 worth of credits due to hanging frames, and non starting jobs. Total render farm bill was about $1600 for a job that was estimated around $550. And It didn't even finish the last 30% But even worse is my client has lost confidence in me. I will never trust the Chaos cloud again for client work.

[squintnic]

It is frustrating sometimes I too have missed deadlines due to idiosyncracies on Chaos that are not documented in the past but those fund returned after requesting them - had to doubel spend to get it done elsewhere.

However I have been using it more and more after some support help (that I agree is exteremely slow unless you push very hard - compared to other farms it really needs improvement here) I was able to get everything going on all current jobs.

Were you using CPU or GPU? Depending on the job CPU I recommend Renderbuzz - cheap, professional and proper support.

In time I still hope Chaos Cloud keep improving but to their credit it has gotten better and the ease of use in the UI is something I really appreciate and some things like only uploaidng data thats new is a great time saver on big jobs. So I would say get in touch with supporert (it will take 7 days) and see if you can get to the bottom of the issue and give it another go. I dont think Chaos has deliberately made a terrible product but the more people use and give feedbakc the better for everyone.

[vladie]

Hi RobT614,

I'm sorry for the bad experience you had with Chaos Cloud. Can you please send me a link to the job/jobs you had problems with? If it's more convenient for you, you can do so in a direct message to me or as an email to support@chaosgroup.com (please mention this forum thread as well). We'll investigate what might have caused the issues and will refund you for the losses. Totally agree that this is not the experience you expect when you have a deadline.

Just a small note. When an animation fails, there's a quick way to render just the uncompleted frames (not started, failed or cancelled). Clone the animation and we'll suggest the uncompleted frames in the frame range field. There are several filters that help quickly select the frames which are uncompleted, all, previous, etc. And the credits spent for all failed frames are automatically refunded.

[RobT614]

Thank you for contacting me. I emailed you the details of the project and links to the specific jobs.

[vladie]

Thanks RobT614. We are already looking into the issues and will follow up with you soon.