render settings for render farm?

[tom182]

hi folks,

I have an animation that is approx 2000 frames, (wall of house being constructed, bricks, studs, panel boards, copper piping etc,)

I am thinking of sending it to a render farm so i can get this finished asap. How can i ensure that what i get back from them will be free of artifacts/flickers etc. I have done some sections of it on 'medium animation preset' and looks fine until one object appears and it looks pretty noisy. I have shyed away from animation until now, any advice would be much appreciated,
Thanks,
Tom

[GAestudio]

Ask them to give you a test of some frame ranges, for example 0-4, 200-204, 500-504.. and so on, then you will be able to see flickerings or noise. I always ask for a test like this to my render farm provider and they do it for free.

[davidr]

We had the same situation, and here's what we found: Our 1yr old wkstations are dual Xeon 8GB, and they rendered a frame in ~1hr. Our older renderfarm took ~3hrs/frame. We had 3000 and no time, so we went with a service that advertizes '64-bit dual Xeon 16GB machines', but not all their machines are like that, so some frames rendered in 1hr, and some took 8hrs!. They were cool about it and adjusted the price in a fair way, but that doesn't help your deadline. it's important to know what will happen with your scene given different machine configs -our scene was very RAM-sensitive.

[gavinwhelan3d]

I do so much rendering its not healthy. I agree with someone else here to render maybe 200-204. you could probably do it locally.
You could also do a region render of maybe 10 to 20 frames of an area you think will give flickers.
Davidr already said this but watch your task-manager as you render a frame. If your RAM usage goes above what the render-farm machines have you'll have problems.
Its advisable to use cache GI solutions wherever possible. It might also be advisable to split your animation into passes. I don't know what your animation is but maybe something like backround and then animated objects as another pass. I've run into so many problems network rendering.
Make sure your scenes are efficient and clean. use xrefing and vray-proxies as much as you can. Collapse and optimize. i could go on all night.

[Morbid Angel]

if its exterior go ambient light + occlusion, cant go wrong there. If its interior...your in trouble. What happens with the render farms is that there are too many things that can go wrong, but in a lot of their terms of agreement it clearly states that its not their fault if your renders come out wrong. They basically want a 1 click render scene and don't want to spend time to trouble shoot.
Another thing to mention is that depending on their network setup, your frames might render much slower, if you have a lot of textures and proxies. If the network is not fast enough it will take much longer to pull all that data across. We had renders go from 15 min/frame on local 4 core machine to 3 hours on 8 core machine. Solution was to copy all assets locally, but lucky for us some one was willing to help free of charge.