Free watermarked test renders

[sebbiej]

Hi Chaos,

I was wondering if it'd be possible at some point for Chaos to introduce free watermarked test renders (say 1-5 frames of an animation) so that we can get an idea of how many credits that we might need to buy for a project without having to spend a minimum of £90 for 100 credits. Either that or some kind of a calculator or estimator built into V-Ray for Maya that'll give us a rough estimate of how many credits we might need to buy in order to render a still or an animation using your set-up.

By the way, I used Cloud last week to render out an animation and I was really impressed with how it works! Being able to see live previews of all the frames was such a great feature. It's so easy to use!

[vladie]

Hi sebbiej,

Thanks for the kind words!

With respect to your question, we have considered both - a watermark and a cost calculator based on V-Ray Benchmark. Most probably we will work on the latter really soon.

BTW I guess you have tried Chaos Cloud using the 20 free trial credits. Can you please share whether they weren't enough? Any details would help.

Thanks,
Vladie

[sebbiej]

Thanks for the response Vladie, that's great to hear that you're working on a cost calculator. It would be a great help, I guess especially for hobbiests, small studios or part-time freelancers like myself. It'll be good to know how much quote clients for a render without having the upfront cost.

I did indeed use the 20 points, thank you for those. They were great for when I was trying out the system, and actually saved me a couple of times when I needed a 2nd computer to render with whilst my own was rendering out a still locally. The cloud is proving to be really useful for when I need to render out a few images at once, or for rendering an animation. Cloud seems to be a lot more stable than other online farms that I've used too!

[vladie]

Thanks sebbiej!

Please stay tuned and I will follow up with you once we have the cost calculator ready for testing.

Bests,
Vladie

[sebbiej]

Hi vladie, might there be any news of a cost calculator being ready yet?

[vladie]

Hi sebbiej,

I'm sorry for the long delay of my reply but the calculator we have been developing doesn't have satisfactory consistent results. Sometimes it gives accurate results but sometimes, frequently enough, the results are not accurate. And we don't want to mislead the users. That's why there wasn't anything to share that could be tried and tested. We won't continue developing this version of the calculator but we consider a couple of other approaches. We'll keep you updated about them.

Meanwhile I can recommend you to use our sample still scenes as a reference for the cost of a Cloud credit. We keep them up-to-date with the latest V-Ray version. Also soon we'll add several new scenes and the amount of Cloud credits needed to render them in Chaos Cloud.

If you need to calculate the cost for rendering an animation in Chaos Cloud, I'd recommend you to use this guide. Please let me know if these recommendations help.

Bests,
Vladie