I just worked on a job that used GarageFarm. Excellent pricing and VERY fast, but they are quite clueless when it comes to Max, so you really need to hold their hand. They even discouraged us from using XRefs, but we eventually got them to make it work. One of the two or three people you might have to deal with is a total jerk. And for some reason they upload a lot of passes that your file isn’t even set up to render, which is weird. BUT the price and speed I can’t complain about at all.
Personally, I don’t have time for jerks, so I’ll pass in that one.
Thanks much, Glorybound!
I assume I should choose windows servers, or does it matter?
Yeah, Vray is making bank on the whole render node thing, but then I think they deserve it too.
Max is tighted to windows unfortunately.
I have only tried the Windows server.
it seems you can only launch open source images, is this correct? I see Windows Server in the docs, but it is not available in the pulldown[quote=“Guest, post:3, topic:44874”]
There’s more info here:
Best regards,
Vlado
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it seems that you have to request access, for a limited preview, which I just did.
In 3ds max preferences, there is an option to compress the .max files. Often you can save 50% in file size 
(but the 3ds max save process, obviously, is slow)
The rebus checker won’t allow you to upload an uncompress max file.
But still, if your are on ASDL, a 1 Gig scene will took at least 3 hours to upload, multiply by the number of camera of the number of setting, then you spend the full week just uploading.
My experience with the rebus manager is that you only resubmit what has been changed. I did a lot of changes to a job where I had to resubmit several times (super stressed). There is a slight overhead in time for submitting, but it wasn’t too bad.
Edit: So after using my brain a bit, I think I get your problem. Since your maxfile is bloated up to a gig, and the max file is resubmitted through the exporter regardless, it takes for ever.
In that regard, I’m pretty sure I manually updated several textures and had them uploaded and overwrite the existing copies, but I can’t remember how…was it by ftp or …??
My maxfiles are never that big. What are you including to make them this size? Is there nothing you can xref out?
Right, you can write over existing Bitmap, but if you change whatever parameters link to the scene, you are dead, like the frame to render or add a render element or change the cam parameters…
A 10 000 M² plot with several house, trees, stone, cars… even with most of them in proxy mode and you easily get nearby 1 Gig.
In case it help, here is a really good tutorial about Amazon service.
http://www.judpratt.com/tutorials/ec2-renderfarm/
Better to pick up a very powerfull machine to avoid spending lot of money in a lot of license.
I have tried Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud, VMWare, Advance 2000 and most seem to be aimed towards app developers. I built a nice farm on Amazon’s servers, but it is still too expensive. Using cloud services gives me flashbacks to the late 80’s and early 90’s, when I paid for internet per hour. I remember paying a lot for 14 hours per month for slow internet. This, to me, is where we are in public cloud computing; I think I’ll wait a few years.
Has anyone used ZYNC?
I haven’t, but they don’t have prices on their site. Also, looking at their source code, the use Amazon[quote=“fpedrogo, post:20, topic:44819, username:fpedrogo”]
Has anyone used ZYNC?
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Zync is quite expensive…
Zync are no longer operating… and GreenButton got sold to Microsoft and is also no longer operating.
Best regards,
Vlado
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.
The price is well worth it until you are making enough money to add some nodes. Since you have to wait in line it would probably be about the same as having 4 or so nodes yourself unless the render times are crazy. Obviously on this relatively small image I only saved 20min that was lost to having to composite the image after but I did get to use my computer for that 2 hours so if you are working on multiple jobs at once that would be a huge time saver.
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).