Which cloud rendering system to use?

[glorybound]

Google slashed their prices, which caused Amazon to lower theirs, too. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

I thought that might have been the case...
I can do the math on this, but does anyone know off the top of there head if EC2 is more affordable than the average render farm? (Yes, I'm just being lazy).

[Emcs07]

I've been using RenderRocket with mental ray and couldn't be happier. My original plan was to use ZYNC but they seem to have shut down for, in their words, "public" use. So now I started using RR and I have to say it is quite nice, reliable and their support has been really good so far. They also support VRay but I haven't tried using the farm for that, only mentalray.

Regards,
Eduardo

[QuakeMarine1]

I tried Rebus today for the first time. It was ok, I will probably use them again. They give you 10 euros of trial but you cant download your images until you pay them something to keep from people abusing it I guess. The one thing that was strange was that I saved it out to EXR and there was no beauty exr only individual elements. Not sure if I screwed it up of what but that seems strange to me. I usually dont composite the image from layers unless there is something specific I need to adjust manually that looks bad in the beauty. The render would have taken 2.5hours on my 4930k (oc to 4.5ghz) 32gb system and it took about 2 on the distributed rendering rebus and would have cost under 4 euros. It took about 1/2 hour to start my job once it was uploaded (took about 10min to upload with my 5mb/s uploads) because it was at the back of the line I guess. Then it started it with 1 node for about 1/2 hour and worked up to 10 nodes by 1/2 way. Overall I would say it was good, I just wanted to test it out more than anything. What I will be able to use it for is rendering larger than I am currently (usually never go over 4k) without having to wait for a render to finish.

lightcache can be render by one PC only so first REbus use 1 pc
once the LC is done we use up to 100pc but in your case we used 10 only because each first time user get only 10 nodes

once image is done you can download it but the render has a watermark/overlay until you made a payment of 1euro or more
we need to do so since many spam user abuse the free 10 euro we give

[Jason Stewart]

lightcache can be render by one PC only so first REbus use 1 pc
once the LC is done we use up to 100pc but in your case we used 10 only because each first time user get only 10 nodes

once image is done you can download it but the render has a watermark/overlay until you made a payment of 1euro or more
we need to do so since many spam user abuse the free 10 euro we give

Ahh, that makes sense I didn't realize only one can calculate LC. The watermark thing is fine I just wish it was mentioned somewhere when I signed up (it may have been I may have missed it) so I didn't feel like my rendering was being held hostage after rendering it. It wasn't a big deal I bought 1 RP and that released my rendering and I am sure I will use that credit at some point.

[Emcs07]

lightcache can be render by one PC only so first REbus use 1 pc
once the LC is done we use up to 100pc but in your case we used 10 only because each first time user get only 10 nodes

once image is done you can download it but the render has a watermark/overlay until you made a payment of 1euro or more
we need to do so since many spam user abuse the free 10 euro we give

I've used Rebus before and the rendering speed was fantastic, and your Rebus Farminizer app is also amazing. However, if I could suggest something, it would be to increase your upload/download speed of files. Your farm is incredibly fast but the download speed of the finished frames was too long to be usable for me (animation work of 200+ frames @ 1080p). It bottlenecks the speed of your service. If you were to improve the download speed of files your farm would be absolutely incredible.

This is for a test render with watermark, by the way.

All the best,
Eduardo

[QuakeMarine1]

well 12mb per second is the upload I can do. More whould be priceless and still not enough

[alexyork]

How does Rebus work, Marine? Is there a plugin for max? Does it seemlessly integrate? How does it play with error messages etc.?

[JezUK]

I've used Rebusfarm and it's by far the best (so far ).

I really like its integration with Max and it is very fast and quick to learn.

Once upload/download speeds for my ISP are up there, we'll be using Rebus a lot more as right now, the killer is the time it takes for us to put a project up there and get the results back (not Rebus's fault).

[QuakeMarine1]

How does Rebus work, Marine? Is there a plugin for max? Does it seemlessly integrate? How does it play with error messages etc.?

i could explain in detail but it whould go too far - just see the video tutorial on my webside
register and u get fre 10 euro automaticly
send a test of 5 frames and see the magic

in short words you install a plugin to 3ds called Farminizer - it neatless prepare your job for the farm FULLY AUTOMATED
in case your job contain a problem Farminizer report and you need to fix it first
all jobs we are send render correct for sure

thx @jezUK

[snivlem]

So I installed the V-Ray standalone client to the EC2 server. However I can't get the licence to ping my dongle at work.

I've already done this for my home computer, which works fine but the same steps don't work on the amazon cloud. I'm pretty confident it is to do with the VPN (not working even though I set it up and it connects to our office server). Is there any guide explicitly dealing with V-Ray and Amazon's cloud?

[alexyork]

i could explain in detail but it whould go too far - just see the video tutorial on my webside
register and u get fre 10 euro automaticly
send a test of 5 frames and see the magic

in short words you install a plugin to 3ds called Farminizer - it neatless prepare your job for the farm FULLY AUTOMATED
in case your job contain a problem Farminizer report and you need to fix it first
all jobs we are send render correct for sure

thx @jezUK

thank you - will look into this more

[JP-RANCH]

Hi everyone,

Feel free to test the RANCH Renderfarm (www.ranchcomputing.com).
There is a free 50 € trial refill to test the service, with the full power. No watermarks.
The RANCH does not share his computing power between users, so you always have the full power dedicated to your jobs.
===> 480 servers Dual Xeon 12 core/24 thread - 48 GB RAM each.
The free and useful plugin called RANCHecker will prepare and pack your 3DSMax project, ready to send to the RANCH! It is straightforward, very user-friendly, including a code color etc.

Please let me know if you have any inquiries.
I would be pleased to help you out.

JP-RANCH.

[JezUK]

Hi everyone,

Feel free to test the RANCH Renderfarm (www.ranchcomputing.com).
There is a free 50 € trial refill to test the service, with the full power. No watermarks.
The RANCH does not share his computing power between users, so you always have the full power dedicated to your jobs.
===> 480 servers Dual Xeon 12 core/24 thread - 48 GB RAM each.
The free and useful plugin called RANCHecker will prepare and pack your 3DSMax project, ready to send to the RANCH! It is straightforward, very user-friendly, including a code color etc.

Please let me know if you have any inquiries.
I would be pleased to help you out.

JP-RANCH.

This sounds great - as I'm looking for an alternative renderfarm solution.

Do you cater for test renders, like RenderRocket ?

(My usual scenario is to use Renderfarms for High Resolution Still Images).

[JP-RANCH]

This sounds great - as I'm looking for an alternative renderfarm solution.

Do you cater for test renders, like RenderRocket ?

(My usual scenario is to use Renderfarms for High Resolution Still Images).

Hi Jez,

The RANCH uses the MultiBand rendering technique for (high resolution) still images. No longer with distributed rendering.
It's more accurate in our 3DSMax specific guide, page #8 and #9: http://static.ranchcomputing.com/manuals/3dsmax_en.pdf

Sorry I don't know how render rocket proceeds exactly.
But we will help you out for your first job if this is needed. The preparation phase is done by RANCHecker.
You can contact us at: contact@ranchcomputing.com

[JezUK]

Thanks,

Do you have a Cost Estimator for Still Image using 3DS Max and VRay ?