Any commercial renderfarm using DR out there?

[gustojunk]

Hi All,

I have run out of idea of who to call to see if they support Vray and the DR feature. Does anybody know of any rendering service provider that offers this?

Vlado et all,
I talked on the phone today with the guys from www.respower.com they said that they will be willing to help you guys better understand what automated render farms need in onder to make future versions of Vray work with it. They also said that since DR has its own queing system they cannot get it to work because it crashes their systems due to some serious conflicts. Vray is not alone with this problem apparently. They have had no luck with Brazil either. They said that only final render is the solution that currently takes full advantage of their farm for single frame images. For instance they said that 25 computers run a scene in just about 1/25th the time that 1 machine took to run the same scene.


If you want to know more about this (I hope you do) feel free to contact respower. They seem to be a great and affordable farm:

Early Ehlinger (he's the president)
earlye@respower.com
+ 1 866-737-7697 (they are in Alabama, USA)

I really hope we can see Vray become a good farmer soon.

Gustavo

[arobbert]

Gustavo, have you heard the PhotoShop plug-in Genuine Fractals http://www.altamira-group.com ? With this program you can take an image and scale it up to any size with little or no degradation to the image. If you start with an image that is about 20 Megs it works very well. I use it often with good results for print quality. This program has saved me hours of render time. They have a full function demo with a time restriction.

Alexie

[earlye]

Re: Any commercial renderfarm using DR out there?

If you want to know more about this (I hope you do) feel free to contact respower. They seem to be a great and affordable farm:

Thanks for the plug, Gustavo! I thought I would take a minute to clarify a few things:

1. VRay doesn't crash our system due to its internal queueing system. Its internal queueing system makes it impossible for us to support VRay's DR. Although there a number of reasons that this is so, the main problem with the internal queueing system is that it conflicts with our queueing system. Our nodes need to have one master telling them what to do.

2. A secondary problem with VRay's internal queueing system is that it presents a single point of failure. So if the computer running the VRay queue crashes or gets disconnected from the network, or whatever, the nodes working for it will fail as well.

There are considerably more problems involved, too many to go into here.

3. I wouldn't say that we've had no luck with Brazil; it works quite well on our system for animations and we have had some customers use it for single-frame DR with success. In general, they have not been extremely high-resolution renders - just ones where each individual bucket took a very long time. The anecdote I was relating over the phone was for one particular customer. He attempted to do DR for a single ultra-high-res frame, and for him and his scene Brazil did not scale very well. I have not done enough testing to determine if this was a problem endemic to Brazil with respect to ultra-high-resolution renders or if this was a problem with the customer's scene. Only so many hours in a day, and I ave to use the same farm to test things as people are using to render their animations.

4. Initial testing with finalRender for DR does appear to be quite promising. I'm not sure what point Amdahl's law will kick in, but fR does not appear to have significant amounts of inter-pixel dependency based on the limited testing I have done.

We are always willing to talk with any render engine developer to try and get their software working on our system. We have no bias to support any particular package over another, and will do whatever we can (within reason, of course) to support as many engines as possible. Just shoot us an email or give us a ring. Our phone number for you international developer types is US: 256-533-1090, and my email address is early@respower.com