Which cloud rendering system to use?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

Hi! Need a bit of help to choose which cloud rendering service to use… I’ve read about a few but have no previous experience on this. I have a pretty good upload speed, I can upload at several Megabytes per second, usually a 1 GB file takes just a few seconds to upload, of course if the system on the other side have a good server too. I’m using big maps, so have a fast upload is important.

Does it makes a difference if the cloud is no in the US where I’m located? In terms of up,pad download speeds…

Also, need to do pre passes for the lightning, some are just flying cameras so not a big issue, but a few shots I have animation of objects, so need to use the prepass for animation, this need to be supported by the cloud system?

Ideally would be a system where it is just a plugin in the software and no need of complicated operations that can make it fail happens… Like for example I was reading the documents for Ranch Computing, and find it a bit cumbersome on what you have to do to do the passes…

Any recommendations and ideas or words about your experience with certain service will be of great help

Thanks.

2

Cant comment on upload and download, as I am in darkest Africa (ha ha) so upload here is pretty slow. I also never have really massive scenes. But from my experience Rebus are very good, it is easy to use, plus supports prepass etc. the plugin even checks the scene before upload and will let if you have unsupported plugins. Also once textures are uploaded, as long as that project is still on Rebus it will skip uploading those again if they are in a different project.

3

We have a list of authorized render farms with a little description about each of them on out website:
http://chaosgroup.com/en/2/vray\_services.html

I am not sure if this list is up to date so it would be a good idea to contact them directly.

4

I use Rebusfarm also. I think they are really good in terms of speed and support. Their software also checks for missing plugins. I think they support rendering prepasses (not 100% sure so maybe ask them). When I do my animations I usually render the prepass on my machine and then send the rest to rebusfarm. I used their lower price option and the animation still got rendered within a couple of hours.

I don’t think the country matters.

5

Thanks everyone! I will give it a try. It looks so far the best option.

6

I’m pretty happy with rebusfarm but it could be cheaper for stills IMO

7

My personal favourite is Render Nation, they always seem to have someone on hand to deal with any issues that may arise (missing maps, etc).

8

Rebus. Fast and good support. Not sure about price - the first two are more important IMO.

9

I did my first render with them today. All was pretty good and fast.

10

good to read

grz

11

I use Rendercore, there service is pretty great even on late hours. Upload and control is pretty good.

12

Amazon EC2

13

Does Vray work okay on the Amazon EC2 setup?

14

Yes, u set it up urself. You get remote desktop and you can do anything you want to do.

15

Sounds interesting so how does it hook upto your vray dongle?

16

You VPN amazon computers to ur server at home and simply type VPN IP of server. Also you need Server windows in order to get more than 1 VPN incoming connections…

You can make it fully automatic with very little knowledge of windows batch system.

Mine system did this

Autologin- program on internet
Connect to VPN at home for liecnses and so on - simple bath to start shortcuts on desktop with time delay
Map HHD - simple bat file
Start Deadline - bat file
Sync project folders from FTP - allsync app
Ready to render
I never had to log in on amazon EC again. All I did is start as many isntances as I need. Let them sync from FTP and that’s it. Ready to render.

I use FTP to sync my files because simply. If my scene has 2gb assets. 20 instances will download 2gb files from FTP faster than from my home HDD that has upload limited to 6mb/s :wink:

17

Sounding quite complex for my limited networking skills but I think I will check it out. Thanks for the info.

18

Rebus can be annoying due to scene upload obligation even if you change only one single map, or if you have different camera.
If your scene are big, it will take longer to upload than to render.

19

I need to give one of these render farms a try I think.

20

True, but in my experience, it was usually pretty quick second(+) time round as all the maps were already uploaded.