Good alternative to RebusFarm

[LudvikKoutny]

Hello,

I've recently grown very frustrated of the unprofessional way Rebus' plugin handles my scenes, resulting on most of the renderpoints wasted and lots of workflow issues, so I am searching for alternative renderfarms. I would appreciate any suggestions for a reliable render farm services with good safety (so no China please ) that do not feel a need to modify your scene settings because they think they know better and do not impose a ridiculous requirements and limitations for submitting your scene.

Thanks in advance.

[joconnell]

Seems like ranch computing got great recommendations the last time this came up.

[AlexP]

Try Yellowdog also

[LudvikKoutny]

Seems like ranch computing got great recommendations the last time this came up.

Ah, thanks. I actually tried to search the forum first, but had no luck finding a thread where something like this was discussed. Ranch is already in my scope, as it seems to be second biggest farm.

[rikou]

I always had a good experience with ranch computing, good support, always here to help me if needed.

[joconnell]

I was doing a demo for a film job recently where I'd to render a lot of 400 frame hd shots. Each render would have cost around €300 at final res and there was a huge amount of revisions and tests of each - does anyone do animation jobs using a farm and if so, how do they find the budgeting of this? Say if I did 40 test renders that'd end up covering the cost of a lot of nodes easily and I'd almost rather have something to show for it after spending all that money!

I suppose for my next attempt if I was using a farm I'd have to do something like quarter res + low sampling or every nth frame instead.

Do a lot of people use farms as their day to day solution and add it into their margin or is it generally just a last resort solution?

[AlexP]

I was doing a demo for a film job recently where I'd to render a lot of 400 frame hd shots. Each render would have cost around €300 at final res and there was a huge amount of revisions and tests of each - does anyone do animation jobs using a farm and if so, how do they find the budgeting of this? Say if I did 40 test renders that'd end up covering the cost of a lot of nodes easily and I'd almost rather have something to show for it after spending all that money!

I suppose for my next attempt if I was using a farm I'd have to do something like quarter res + low sampling or every nth frame instead.

Do a lot of people use farms as their day to day solution and add it into their margin or is it generally just a last resort solution?

Yellowdog provide a flat fee based on render time of some sample frames, found them to be very user-friendly and flexible.

So, when I had some frames come back bad, or I had to tweak some camera movement. I was able to at no extra cost because I had effectively "rented" the servers for that period (as I understood it)
Provided it was still within the quoted time frame.

[Oleg_Budeanu]

If you have constant rendering needs and you have a good technical guy near you - i can recommend Amazon AWS. You st it up as you need and have full control over it.

[maxedesa]

Oleg, I bet you know this -
Or anyone? -

How do you set up the Slaves so that they are uniquely recognized by the Manager?
Last time I rendered using AWS I had to manually change the Server settings with each individual IP address, and enter the Manager's IP.

In the past, when our instances were set up for Max 2014 I didn't have to do this, but alas, our IT guy who set this up is no longer here, AWOL somewhere in SE Asia.

[Oleg_Budeanu]

Oleg, I bet you know this -
Or anyone? -

How do you set up the Slaves so that they are uniquely recognized by the Manager?
Last time I rendered using AWS I had to manually change the Server settings with each individual IP address, and enter the Manager's IP.

In the past, when our instances were set up for Max 2014 I didn't have to do this, but alas, our IT guy who set this up is no longer here, AWOL somewhere in SE Asia.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]33950[/ATTACH]

Yeah that's the thing about backburner, as you are cloning instances - you have to assign that manually.
That's why i stopped using BackBurner a LONG time ago and swapped to deadline. Especially now when they have per-demand pricing and cloud control - you have control of everything in one panel.

[Morbid Angel]

I was doing a demo for a film job recently where I'd to render a lot of 400 frame hd shots. Each render would have cost around €300 at final res and there was a huge amount of revisions and tests of each - does anyone do animation jobs using a farm and if so, how do they find the budgeting of this? Say if I did 40 test renders that'd end up covering the cost of a lot of nodes easily and I'd almost rather have something to show for it after spending all that money!

I suppose for my next attempt if I was using a farm I'd have to do something like quarter res + low sampling or every nth frame instead.

Do a lot of people use farms as their day to day solution and add it into their margin or is it generally just a last resort solution?

If you are doing a lot of shots, and a lot of renders, its almost certain you need your own / local farm. That cost of a remote farm in such scenario us x100 over what it would have been if you had something local. I suppose I use remote farm only if I have a tight deadline and just can't render in time otherwise.

[Oleg_Budeanu]

If you are doing a lot of shots, and a lot of renders, its almost certain you need your own / local farm. That cost of a remote farm in such scenario us x100 over what it would have been if you had something local. I suppose I use remote farm only if I have a tight deadline and just can't render in time otherwise.

Yeah totally agree. If your choice is - local or remote renderfarm, and you have budget for local - definitely go for local. Especially if you have constant workload.

[Morne]

Ranch has a special offer until 14 November where you can use their POWERFarm for only 0.016 Euro / Ghz.h
That's almost the same cost as their lowend ECOFarm. Pretty good deal
They have 3 different farms and 6 pricing options.
Their newest farm is a GPU farm currently in BETA for 0.011 Euro...

[AndresAhumada]

Hello,

I've recently grown very frustrated of the unprofessional way Rebus' plugin handles my scenes, resulting on most of the renderpoints wasted and lots of workflow issues, so I am searching for alternative renderfarms. I would appreciate any suggestions for a reliable render farm services with good safety (so no China please ) that do not feel a need to modify your scene settings because they think they know better and do not impose a ridiculous requirements and limitations for submitting your scene.

Thanks in advance.

As for my experience.

Never again REBUSfarm. A complete disaster, highly susceptible to failure. Especially the SYNC system.

It does not support the latest plugins.
Generally they prefer to blame scenes to blame the collapse its nodes.

I have emails to prove it.


Frames saved without the layers .... only one.
Frames blank or lack of frames showing that if they are all complete.

[YoyoBoy]

I love Ranch but I have some problems with them: Firstly, they can't render the VRay Framebuffer, so you have to switch it to the Max one. Second, for some reason they can't render EXR files with render elements in them, so you need to keep those separate. Lastly, their system won't compress EXR files. So I've been using TGA files instead.