Render Farm

[glorybound]

We have talked about it, and there are posts, but I thought I would start a new one. I have so much work coming in, and can't possibly do it. I have to line these up like the plans landing, and the bottle neck is render times. Ideally, I don't want to buy more servers; I would like to farm it out, but I don't want the complexity that I have experienced with demo farms. Also, I can't pay $1000.00 per still, and the $.25 per Ghz hour makes no sense to me. I want to upload my model, with all my assets, and hit render. These are stills, so if it takes 3-4 hours on my farm, I would expect a fraction of the time on there's. I use multiscatter, PSD manager, V-Ray, and maybe a coupe others, so that has always been my problem.

Any ideas? Any suggestions, other than the obvious ones?

[skogskalle]

This is probably one of the obvious ones But have you tried Rebusfarm, and if so what dont you like about it? I use it on most projects and almost never have any issues with it. Way back I had issues when using hdris to light my scenes, and i think there was also some problem with it changing the aa-settings but I dont think this is the case anymore... the renders seems to look the way they should.
Im pretty sure they support multiscatter (although i use forestpro) - not sure about PSD manager and the other stuff you use. Have you asked them?
A still often costs less than 10$ (sometimes alot less) and ive never payed more than around 50$.

Ive tried a couple of farms in the past and this one is by far the easiest ive tried. Just click "render on rebus" instead of the normal renderbutton and it takes care of the rest...
(dont mean to sound like and ad for rebus here, but im actually really please with them

[glorybound]

I have tried about all of them, but I guess the fear is mine. I stop/start a lot, and I don't have that luxury, so I'll have to be sure when I hit render. I'll check them out again.

This is probably one of the obvious ones But have you tried Rebusfarm, and if so what dont you like about it? I use it on most projects and almost never have any issues with it. Way back I had issues when using hdris to light my scenes, and i think there was also some problem with it changing the aa-settings but I dont think this is the case anymore... the renders seems to look the way they should.
Im pretty sure they support multiscatter (although i use forestpro) - not sure about PSD manager and the other stuff you use. Have you asked them?
A still often costs less than 10$ (sometimes alot less) and ive never payed more than around 50$.

Ive tried a couple of farms in the past and this one is by far the easiest ive tried. Just click "render on rebus" instead of the normal renderbutton and it takes care of the rest...
(dont mean to sound like and ad for rebus here, but im actually really please with them

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Amazon EC2 servers. The only solution. I pay 0.40£ per 1 hour of 2x 8 core if I'm not wrong.

U set it up urself, u run it urself u pay for what u use only.

I would do help you out with it but I'm too busy atm to spend 2h a day on managing the workload :s

Sory,GL !

[glorybound]

I tried Amazon's elastic server, but I was confused as heck. Now, that was awhile back, so it might have gotten better.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Well its a bit... difficult. When I was starting it was hard for me to deal with it. But now after writing few custom scripts its all automatic. Start slave, auto connection yo my network, accessing licenses, accessing HDD, saving files etc etc. Ec2 is great because you can license out all software from home and you get all plugins you need to get the job done.

[Morbid Angel]

send me a pm. My farm is available now we can talk about details.

[stevesideas]

Hi Bobby. I've used Respower a number of times. You can purchase a subscription and render out everything even if your subscription runs out. As long as you get everything uploaded.

I also have five render machines (soon to upgrade to another five to make 10 in total). Not sure if that would help at all.

I realise you have a lot of work so if you do need an extra hand feel free to send me an email or PM.

[trixian]

I recently used Rebus my self.
The whole price calculation is a bit difficult as sometimes you get frames in your animation that take longer, and then you might run out of renderpoints if you didn't purchase enough up front.
The problems I had were pretty quickly fixed, or at least thoroughly looked into, but there were some weird things that popped up.
In the beginning, all frames failed, and the rebus guys claimed it was because I was using exr as the file format for my render elements, and that I should use 8 bit pngs instead. This is obviously not true, and in the end it worked, but I'm actually not sure how or what fixed it.
After that we found out that state-sets in max2014 were best left alone, as in never ever even opening the dialogue in the scene you are submitting to render.
I'm guessing that most of my problems were due to using 2014 for the first time, and being confident that everything worked as claimed by Autodesk.

Then again, not actually having tried any of the other services out there (just checking prices and looking at their submitt and file handling system) my 2 cents are probably not worth much, but they seem to have the best scene\file handling system out there.
Though the amazon servers thing looks interesting, but maybe rather daunting.
Could anyone who knows, write a quick, but more detailed description on what you need to do to use them, and what pitfalls there are?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I recently used Rebus my self.
The whole price calculation is a bit difficult as sometimes you get frames in your animation that take longer, and then you might run out of renderpoints if you didn't purchase enough up front.
The problems I had were pretty quickly fixed, or at least thoroughly looked into, but there were some weird things that popped up.
In the beginning, all frames failed, and the rebus guys claimed it was because I was using exr as the file format for my render elements, and that I should use 8 bit pngs instead. This is obviously not true, and in the end it worked, but I'm actually not sure how or what fixed it.
After that we found out that state-sets in max2014 were best left alone, as in never ever even opening the dialogue in the scene you are submitting to render.
I'm guessing that most of my problems were due to using 2014 for the first time, and being confident that everything worked as claimed by Autodesk.

Then again, not actually having tried any of the other services out there (just checking prices and looking at their submitt and file handling system) my 2 cents are probably not worth much, but they seem to have the best scene\file handling system out there.
Though the amazon servers thing looks interesting, but maybe rather daunting.
Could anyone who knows, write a quick, but more detailed description on what you need to do to use them, and what pitfalls there are?

Here is short info how EC2 works.

You rent 1 PC (slow one for start) for 10p an hour or less. You start it up and connect to it via remote desktop connection(skipping here few boring steps how to set it up etc etc). Once you loged in you set up a VPN to your home for licenses and HDD access. Once you have HDD access and VPN you can install your software. You download Max/Maya/ETC/install it, license it or whatever, then Vray and so on. Then you set up the HDD space and file mirroring cleaverly so that all jobs can access files from their own EC2 server hdds rather than your own HDD at home- since your upload speed probably is too slow. Then you sync files and render it just as if you were to render it at home. You can use backburner or any other render manager or what ever you want. Its all how you set it up. And thats it. Happy to use and u can clone instances and have extra power as you need it.

The way I did it is that I write few autobat scripts that start when PC starts so it automatically log in to windows, join VPN, download all scene data from my scene folder, start deadline/ maya/vray/max and it pops up on Deadline as extra render node ready to render. So It takes 1 min to start instance and then within 5-10 minutes(depending on scene size and download time) I'm ready to render. All get saved to my local HDD over network so yay.

Pitfalls... a lot of setting up(like any other PC when you install it frsh. Biggest one you have to code few simple bat scripts( might upload them here if any1 want it badly) But once you do it for your 1 PC then you can use that windows "Image" as source for further instances so its easy and quick.

Thanks, bye.

[glorybound]

Well, I am trying Renderbus. I tried it before, but for some reason I didn't follow through. Now, I'll be interested in how it handles all the textures. I did the calculator, and it said that it'll cost me a whole $9 to render my still. Now, if this works, I am sold!

[glorybound]

The Smartcheck is cool, and worth installing the plug-in, by itself.

[glorybound]

So far, I ran out of render point, but I only purchased $10, which was the estimated time. I purchased $10 more, and I resumed the render. My local is 80% with LC, and REBUSfarm is 60% done with final render.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Problem with render farms is that a lot of the time they arent local but virtual. So you dont get all the power out of slave. Also if your home computer is a 8 core 3 ghz system and render farm is 6 core 3ghz system then you will wait longer as well... One of reasons why I keep to EC2 they have 16 core/60gb ram rigs there that I can rent and fully check machine specs I'm using...

[glorybound]

I hear others say that Amazon's server end up costing them a ton of money. Are you finding that?

Problem with render farms is that a lot of the time they arent local but virtual. So you dont get all the power out of slave. Also if your home computer is a 8 core 3 ghz system and render farm is 6 core 3ghz system then you will wait longer as well... One of reasons why I keep to EC2 they have 16 core/60gb ram rigs there that I can rent and fully check machine specs I'm using...