Render Farms. Animation Costs.

[neil poppleton]

I would grateful to hear what render farm companies people use and are charged for render farm services.

 

I would be particulary interested in ball park numbers for say a typical 3 - 4 minute animation with frame times of around 15 minutes.

 

I appreciate pc specs and 3d models will vary drastically but just rough costs and thoughts would be appreciated.

[Chris MacDonald]

Render out 1 frame of your animation and make a note of the render time and your processor type/clock speed and either use the calculator on the render nation website here or give them a call/email, they are always quick to get back to me.

[neil poppleton]

Thanks Chris.

 

Do you have experience in using render farms.

 

I was just asking a general question to hear about peoples experience / use / cost.

[Chris MacDonald]

Yeah we've always used Render Nation when we have fallen too close to a deadline to render it out in-house, they have always sorted us out straight away with minimum of fuss, plus I like having a person that can let me know if something has gone wrong on their end rather than one of those things that works as a plugin within max (rebus farm?). Nothing is more scary than the thought of submitting a thousand or more frames of animation to a farm and have it all come back wrong, but still being invoiced for it!

[Scott Schroeder]

I've used Rebus and had good success with it. It was about $1500 for 3 minutes of 720 frames and each frame was around 20 minutes on our local machines. Once the job hit the Rebus farm, we had the whole animation done in 2 hours. We opted to render to 720 then using Red Giant's Instant HD and up res the frames to 1080, which worked out quite well to my surprise.

 

What I did before submitting was to run a 3/4ths res version of each animation path on our local farm to ensure that there was no flickering or anything goofy. Make sure you check, re-check, then re-check again before you submit.

[Chris MacDonald]

Make sure you check, re-check, then re-check again before you submit.

 

Definitely. It can be a very, very costly mistake otherwise.

[Devin Johnston]

Scott did you render out your LC/IR locally our use Rebus for that, also how well doese the plugin for max work? I'm asking because I'm working on a project now that I might have to use them on

[Scott Schroeder]

I did all of the LC/IR maps locally as that is more cost effective. The plug-in works really well, and so does the app for your smart phone that allows you to watch your renders as well as start/stop renderings. You can also start/stop the frames download from the app. I would recommend turning off auto download for the final frames if you use them. I found it easier to just set the download to start once all of the frames were done.

 

The only hitch with Rebus is that it submits your job name as the name of your file, not the camera and there is no way that I know of to override the name. To get around that so I could submit all of the jobs at once, and to help with submission times as it only collects exactly what you need rather than just everything in the scene, I just did a save as with each camera and only the objects that were in the scene.

[neil poppleton]

Would be good to hear anyones elses experience.

[notamondayfan]

Hi Neil,

 

I've used Ranch render farm in the past, and what makes these different from others is their "priority" system. Basically you submit your job and choose a priority, the high the priority, the more it costs, but you get to the top of the queue quicker. Lower priority means lower cost, but you might have to wait until a quiet period to have your project rendered, which is good if you're not up against a tight deadline. Cost wise I can't rember to be honest.

 

Also I've heard good things about Render Nation (based in Liverpool), and I've also spoken to Render Now, who seemed very cheep, UK based, with people you can speak to.

 

Dean

[neil poppleton]

Not heard of Ranch before.

 

Cheers Dean.

[Devin Johnston]

I just finished using Rebusfarm, the best thing about their service is most definitely the plugin. It collects all your scene files and uploads everything with the click of a button, this made it well worth it to me. They also have great tech support and reasonable prices.

[neil poppleton]

Devin,

 

Out of interest what did you pay and for what. Ball park no;s would be good. Render Farm cost calculators which I have reviewed always seem a little expensive.

[Devin Johnston]

I was paying 3.9 cents per GHz hour, total cost was $1193 USD. We're doing a big project and needed a little extra power, they have something like 600 machines and we only have 100 so it was handy.

[neil poppleton]

Thanks Devin.