Having been freelance for many years I’m seeing some big changes in direction in terms of applications and plugins used to create renders. I’ve spoken to a number of clients with Vray render farms that are thinking of switching just based on the fact that the render node licenses are so expensive. It didn’t used to be like this in terms of costings per node and whilst I realise that business models adapt over time it seems like companies are really being hit hard or having to make descisions not to use Vray. I wonder if Chaosgroup might have shot themselves in the foot with this kind of pricing structure.
I’d love to hear from someone at Chaosgroup about this.
I’m still using V-Ray 5, because I don’t have the money to upgrade. Everyone is asking me to work cheaper and cheaper while the demand get’s more and more complex. 24 hour render times / frame are not uncommon, even if I reduce quality, which I’m not allowed to do - on contrary.
Today I have totally capable render node hardware stand by, but I don’t have the money to buy more render node licenses for those. Maybe it’s better to concentrate developing workflow towards fewer but better nodes.
Render node licensing has definitley become cost prohibitive. I just had to fork out over $3000 usd for my annual 20 pack. I have 20 render nodes with 10 year old systems which were top of their generation. My problem with their pricing is that it always seems to favour the big companies at the expense of the little guy. You get bigger discounts for more nodes and the effectiveness of each node is reletive to its compute power. So a big company with the money to have state of the art machines gets the cheapest deal per pixel. Although I have a decent render farm for a small studio, I am essentially a freelancer, and I have purchased almost everything in my network second hand with considerable time and effort invested in the knowledge base to build it and scraping together the cash for the hardware over time. Seems to me Chaos is being greedy with their pricing. Why are they benefiting so large in a circumstance like this other than "they just can’'? 'When I render animations, I need the speed but mostly the farm is just sitting there doing nothing. And yes it’s still cheaper than cloud rendering. I think they need to have a reduced price available for people like me. The pricing is simply too high and feels like a betrayal of a loyal customer. Wont go ahead with vray next year if this doesnt get addressed.