Outsourcing rendering

[Smalerbi]

Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone has used a reputable rendering company to help with production needs. I’m going to be starting up a job that requires a quick turn around beyond my in house capabilities.

What about Rebus Rendering Farm? Anyone use them?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

Scott.

[Olli96]

I am using it from time to time and i am very happy with them. The Farminizer Software they use is prett cool, you can submit your render jobs directly in max and send it to them. Pricing is fine and if you buy some renderpoints in advance you will also get a nice discount.
The guy who runs it is also active in this forum, search for QuakeMarine1 and drop him a line if you want to know something specific.

[Smalerbi]

thanks.....I will take a look. BTW.....you need a new image file. Davd Hasselhoff in that outfit? That is just wrong!!

[pixelplume]

I'm not sure where you are located, but respower has been great to me in the past. http://www.respower.com/

[dellis]

We've used them and have planned to use them for all of our animation needs. Software works great and the rendering is fast as hell!

[jujubee]

Last time I used respower I had issues as I was using x64 and their systems weren't up to date. I was crashing their entire farm. They were nice guys however and issued me a refund because I lost several days.

[Coffee Rabbit]

I'm currently using respower and they are cheap and have responsive support. But I've found I really have to dumb down my settings to get things through their farm under their 2 hour frame time limit. A frame that takes half an hour on my laptop (core i7) times out on their farm.

[Smalerbi]

Thanks everyone for the responses. I will take a look at respower, however, I’m a bit concerned about there horsepower based on what I’m hearing. I am still running a 32bit OS but the scenes will be polygon intensive. Mostly terrain modeling with lots of trees as Proxies and have no time for technical issues on there end. I will be rendering around 15,000 frames and I’m running a very tight deadline so fast turn around is very important. I will take a look to see what kind of equipment they have. I hope they are running at least what I have……Dual Zeon quad cores per machine. I just wish my farm was larger.

Thanks again all.

Scott.

[Lucetius]

I have used them a few times recently and my biggest grip is how busy they are. At best, I've gotten 40-50 nodes working on my projects. I have learned to consider them "an addition" to my farm and split the job accordingly. As people have mentioned you will most likely run in to a few of their servers that crash repeatedly. you will have to log in frequently and restart the frams that crash or, if you call in and tell them which servers are failing on your job, they will take them offline and or remove them from your queue. I have submitted both 32 and 64 bit jobs and find that I get about the same amount of throughput with each. I will say that thier 64bit servers seem to be a bit more stable then the 32bit ones. several of the 32bit slaves there only have 1-2gigs of ram which can mean a lot of swapping to disk and long rendertimes/timeouts.

I'm not trying to scare you away from using them, just to warn you that it's not a submit/forget situation. There will be some management on your end required. For the price, I'll certainly use them again.

Thanks everyone for the responses. I will take a look at respower, however, I’m a bit concerned about there horsepower based on what I’m hearing. I am still running a 32bit OS but the scenes will be polygon intensive. Mostly terrain modeling with lots of trees as Proxies and have no time for technical issues on there end. I will be rendering around 15,000 frames and I’m running a very tight deadline so fast turn around is very important. I will take a look to see what kind of equipment they have. I hope they are running at least what I have……Dual Zeon quad cores per machine. I just wish my farm was larger.

Thanks again all.

Scott.

[Coffee Rabbit]

Yeah, for my current project I've been rendering for two weeks straight and I haven't had more than 25 nodes at a time working on my project and for a couple days it dipped down to 3 nodes.

[robdeja]

You should certainly consider speaking to Jim or Dan at Render Nation.

They have a great outfit, lots of power and they provide great support.
We use them for all our rendering needs!

[QuakeMarine1]

hi
Rebus here

all our nodes are 64bit with 8gb to 16gb RAM and 4 to 16 threads
our rule is first in first out
you get all free nodes and normaly you not need to wait longer 1 hour to start your job

we provide the most easy way to submit a job - you just need to press 3 buttons and job will start
our Farminizer is a plugin for 3ds - it automaticly prepare your scene for render, it gather all (yes ALL) external file and textures, it analyse your scene about errors or no-goes and furthermore it warn user about incorrect or strange rendersettings
its fully automated and run 24/7

if you can send the job using Farminizer it will render correct
We have the submit and forget solution
you not believe? you better try

http://www.rebusfarm.de/Video_Tutori...th_3ds_Max.wmv



andre

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

Just curiously, instead of using all that ''pay''farms isn't cheaper to put some money on the side and just buy your own farm ? I did some calcs and for 30 sec animation or so id have to pay like 10-20k£+ (long time ago cant remember exact numbers) for that price I'd get 10-30 quads i7 tunning 4ghz.


Up: Actually never mind, Rebusfarm gave me calc price of 1-2.5k £ for the renders I would do which isnt that bad. I gees I either did something wrong in past or it just was more expensive...

[grantwarwick]

I've had a few problems with Rebus (90% my end), but Overall they are pretty awesome and cheap.
Andre answers all questions on MSN when online, So Can't ask for better support really and when there has been any problems he has not hesitated to Refund points/ manually upload to FTP for me or personally
try and figure out the problems So I'd go Rebus.
My advice is to just Triple check your scene.


I've used them for Highres A2 Prints, and Animation.

[m_hinks]

You should certainly consider speaking to Jim or Dan at Render Nation.

They have a great outfit, lots of power and they provide great support.
We use them for all our rendering needs!

We just used RenderNation after your high praise and we're very pleased with their support and facilities.

Will be using them when ever possible in the future, client budgets permitting!

Mark