Should I start using Vantage vs using in-house render farm

[Luma3d]

If want to see the power of animations through Vantage check out the BOC Academy samples on YouTube.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Hopefully I can help from here as well..

Phillip Miller I didn't realize I could add a new RTX to a 7 year old workstation! That will be a lot cheaper. Some of my scenes take around 30gigs of RAM to render. Can I get a RTX with that much video RAM? What happens if my RAM usage exceeds my video RAM amount?

The ram thing is an issue, we bought an A6000 48gb vram for this very reason, bought it 2-3 years ago and although it's not mega fast it's ultra reliable, it's more than paid for itself with the saved time. Large projects generally need more ram and can be a little untidy, saying this I've got into the habit of using only 2k jpg maps on textures where time permits. Most of our super large schemes never go above 30gb. Chaos also did a great job with mipmapping through the early updates in Vantage, this saves your RAM no end.

If you can't stretch to an A6000 or similar I would wait and buy one of the new Nvidia 5090 RTX's with 32gb ram for probably £2k and then ensure all projects are streamlined.

One last thing is with Vantage check what's hogging the RAM, it can sometimes be something like Forest Pack mulch or an asset brought in from 3dsky, get into the habit of streamlining your assets as this saves time down the road in all projects.

Luma3d How does the render times compare for an animation between your 5 workstation render farm vs. your laptop with RTX using Vantage?

Personally I found render farms to be a nightmare, way too much admin and errors, factor in all the time managing them and it's not worth it for the majority of work, having it all render on one GPU has been a major plus.

We bought an Amari machine for about 10k, paid for itself in about 3 months.

Hope that helps.

Jason