A Real Renderfarm company?

[Metzger]

Anyone know a renderfarm that supports V-Ray stable build or any specified build, and has 24 gigs of ram on fast machines?

One place I am looking into only has the 2.0 release version of V-Ray, and render nodes with 8 gigs of ram.

Looking to see if anyone else has had experience with this.

Thanks!

-Scott

[pechart]

You can get in touch with these guys, located in cologne i think:

http://www.rebusfarm.net/index.php/d...der-farm-specs

I don't know if they support the latest stables, but maybe you can talk to them. They were very friendly last time I got in touch with them. Please share your experiences!

[INDUSTRIROMANTIK]

We have used http://www.rendernet.se/. I think they use whatever build you want.

/Patrik

[Yannick]

You can get in touch with these guys, located in cologne i think:

http://www.rebusfarm.net/index.php/d...der-farm-specs

I don't know if they support the latest stables, but maybe you can talk to them. They were very friendly last time I got in touch with them. Please share your experiences!

Rebus definitively don't support stable or nightly, on top of that we had problem with the image DMC sampling being changed at render time. So even if they have a nice plugin within Maya, it wasn't working for us.

[Metzger]

Yannick: I tried Render Rocket but the software they have isn't reading the V-Ray proxy geo.. Also, I think they have the same DMC sampling bug too! I noticed the edges looking mighty crispy for the renders I did check on.. Also, machines only have 8-12 gigs of Ram..

INDUSTRIROMANTIK: Thanks, I will check them out.

[RobPhoboS]

I used rebus, no support for files with references, so bare that in mind as it was a nightmare for me to get working after importing files again (loads of textures vanished etc).
Some weirdness with Maya, no idea what happened.

But I was happy with their service and will always use them in the future. (just to note, their tech guys don't really know maya, 3dsmax is their speciality)

[Metzger]

What's the deal with V-Ray, Renderfarms, and relative paths? I am having to edit every file I want to render and remove paths to get things to render correctly on these farms.. It really takes the fun out of rendering. :P

[ultrasonic]

What's the deal with V-Ray, Renderfarms, and relative paths? I am having to edit every file I want to render and remove paths to get things to render correctly on these farms.. It really takes the fun out of rendering. :P

Haha! And i was about to give up on my own renderfarm dreams I did setup a small renderfarm (400cores) already that worked with any nightly and I upload *.vrscenes only (proxies and textures are automatically uploaded too...they just need to be somewhere inside the maya project directory)....the thing is,that it isn't ready to go at the moment...

I was thinking that the many renderfarms out there would be too much competition, so i decided to discontinue the idea....but maybe i was wrong when i hear you guys talking.

Do you - and I mean all of you - think it would be a good idea to give it another try to setup an easy and convenient way to submit a render from maya to a renderfarm? What would be a good price for let's say 1 hour on one quadcore-i7 2.6GHz?

cheerio
Oliver

[RobPhoboS]

It's something I've wanted to do as well, perhaps with discounts for students/home users. I have many friends whom would invest considerable amounts of cash (if I wanted to go via them rather than a bank) BUT coming up with a decent pitch and a USP is tricky though.
I've no idea on the pricing though. I was ok with the prices from Rebus but I knew my scene's, once through the queue, would blast out their side extremely quickly.

[Metzger]

Yannick: Ok.. So check this out.. I was working with RenderRocket for rendering but they had the 2.0 release of V-Ray and all my rendering was with a stable build. If you take a newer version of V-Ray and render it with the older 2.0 release it changes sampling from ADMC to Adaptive sub. If you are going to use a render farm company like Render Rocket, make sure they can install the same build of V-Ray that you are using. But I think if you are going to do that, you have to actually lease a group of machines for a duration of time so they can custom configure it to your current standards.

[snivlem]

I know you guys know a lot more than I do about this stuff, but just checking you are using UNC path file names right (not mapped drives)? that's usually the reason for disappearing proxies

[Metzger]

snivlem: Well we had Render Rocket setup a vroot folder that matches our directory structure then added an extra / at the beginning of the path. It works out well. By default the render rocket system takes everything into a single directory. But it doesn't grab ies lights or proxy files that way.

Man... I miss big farms at a studio locally. This render farm shit is expensive and a huge pain in the ass. I really can't wait for more robust GPU rendering in V-Ray when they release 24 gig graphics cards. I have been optimizing like never before. I think you learn a ton more in V-Ray when you have fewer resources to render.

That being said, the guys at Render Rocket provide really great support. But its expensive and time consuming to set this up if you have loads of data to render. We need more CPU and memory breakthroughs.

Thanks again to everyone for all the help. You guys rock.

[brainspoon]

I encountered that DMC bug too. Chaosgroup must have changed something in the scripts between the versions.

Did you try to put a prerender mel script in the render globals that will set the proper dmc settings? That should fix it on the farm.


Another thing that I did was on my local machine, from where I submit the jobs to the farms I had two vray folders in my Maya folder. One with the 2.0 release build and the newest nightly for working locally.
Before submitting a job to the renderfarm I told Maya to load the old vray and checked the scene and resaved it with the old version. Then you can be sure everything works properly.

[Yannick]

Yannick: Ok.. So check this out.. I was working with RenderRocket for rendering but they had the 2.0 release of V-Ray and all my rendering was with a stable build. If you take a newer version of V-Ray and render it with the older 2.0 release it changes sampling from ADMC to Adaptive sub. If you are going to use a render farm company like Render Rocket, make sure they can install the same build of V-Ray that you are using. But I think if you are going to do that, you have to actually lease a group of machines for a duration of time so they can custom configure it to your current standards.

Hi, thanks for the tip.
I am aware version is a big issue between studios and remote farms.
We have an inhouse render farm but we keep maxing it out.
You mentioned you don't have a render farm. What happen to your truck? (http://silverdraft.com/)
Yannick

[Reaversword]

Metzger, give a try at "PARQUE CIENTIFICO DE MARCIA", here you can see it in the list:

http://chaosgroup.com/en/2/vray_services.html#Murcia


I'm not part of the staff, but I've been helping they a little bit, I have a personal friend inside, and till I know, they was running Vray for Maya well, when they started with the Max version, I stop to collaborate, but I think the could help you.