Rendering off-site and the 'cloud'

[Ramsay]

Thats what I do in my little office at home =D no need central heating if I render lol... Where are you guys located?

I used to have a tiny office, so small it could only fit me, my desk, a filing cabinet and a set of shelves with 6 intel Q6600 machines for rendering. I used to have to leave the windows open at night if I was rendering an animation or the place would be like a sauna in the morning. One night the cleaner came in and must have closed the windows... I arrived in the morning to a bunch of machines beeping at me, 3 of which had completely overheated and died! Have a much bigger/cooler office now luckily and all the machines now run aftermarket coolers.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I've tried a few options of render farms out, so far the main problem I have in the upload. Which as you say is changing in the uk. I still think you require a small amount of machines inhouse to do tests on and render day to day then send the full res version to render on a farm. Problem is farms are made for animations more than stills. Yes rebus does an option where it distributes. I just watched my money burn away when that option was on.

A quick look around I was working out that a render was costing me £25 for a scene that would take 5-6 hours to render on my current spec @ a res of 5-6k.

My main issue with render farms is that it wants to package the job up and send it off each time, so if you have a scene with 2 or 3 cameras you have to send the scene up each time. Work around of course is to animate one camera over 3 frames.

We decide on 3-4 machines in house as dedicated nodes, of course the workstations would free up over night adding power..... and anything bigger would send out.

Try render flow, they easy and efficient !

I have 10h render 10k pixels, done in 1.5h or so and price was around 10quid last year... its very cheap and their plugin pack and upload scenes on its own... I think u also can tell it to render from different cameras in receny builds....

[mike_kennedy]

I am a freelancer at home and a full timer at work. We have our own render farm for the office and it handles everything.I have used Ranch Computing. They are cheap ...some times they have the odd issue..but it's nice having that much power on tap. Only issue I have is their farm has gone down once or twice on me and the time difference can make it a little heart attack inducing when I am working they are asleep..but they always refund any jobs that their system affects in full.
Their prices are super cheap though so it balances out.

[flino2004]

I was wondering if anybody here is using those GPU expanders for day to day renderings and testing images...it should be a good combo at least in theory... GPU in house farms and cloud for finals.