Hello everyone, my name is Alex, I am the owner of CGIFarm.com and I want to make this the official topic for CGIFarm issues or questions.
Our farm supports 3DS Max only for now. We are focusing on getting the best workflow possible for this software before moving to support Maya, C4d etc.
Our users claim that we have the fastest workflow for 3ds max and it's like our software is 20 years forward in time compared to other renderfarms.
These are not my words, one of the guys working on a studio told this to me when he was comparing us with other renderfarm services that he worked with.
Having this said, the user also stated that we are not the cheappest farm on the market either, but not the most expensive. We are open for business
and offer some good deals for studios that use our service a lot, or have big jobs to render.
Here are some of the features of our platform:
1. Ability to upload a package containing one or multiple .max files and reuse the package for creating different jobs like:
a. Test jobs to sample the render time and the frame range to make sure that your scene renders fine
b. After test jobs are completed and you are satisfied with the results, you create another job with the full frame range.
2. The ability to customize the render settings for already uploaded 3ds max scenes. We call this "Post-upload settings". We achieve this by using our 3ds max
plugin to export the render settings for Corona or V-ray in a Json file and post it on the create job window. This takes about 10-15 seconds to update pretty much
anything you have available in the render setup dialogue. Most important things are resolution and settings that affect render time.
Along with this ability to export render settings, we also introduced the region/crop/blowup rendering. You can create any region in your 3ds max instance and export
that with our plugin, even if your uploaded scene was set to render on "view" . This allows for very fast tests on high resolution images to make sure that your image
is going to be clear at a certain passes level. I am sure there are much more advantages to this and I invite you to test it out and find out what kind of things you can do
with it. Here's a video going over the full settings exporting workflow:
3. In order to support multiple job creation from the same package, we had to develop and advanced yet simple dashboard for the users to customize their jobs. This
comes as the 3rd listed feature, but I would say that's the most important one. There you can see previews of your rendered jobs, get how long it took per frame or per job to render,
upload multiple packages at the same time, without the need of installing the 3ds max plugin. You can choose to upload any .rar, .zip, .tar file that you receive from your
designers and let our system figure out what 3ds max version to use to open the files, what plugins are used in the scene, state if we are missing assets or plugins etc...
After the package processes, you get a full report on the files that got repathed and relinked to avoid having any missing assets. Watching this quick intro video will give
you a brief overview on how things works on our farm:
You can try our cost calculator to see how much it will cost to render your projects:
https://www.cgifarm.com/renderfarm-cost-calculator .
We recently opened another location called "priority location" where we can customize the number of cpus and ram to render any type of jobs we might receive from our users.
The system prooven to be working 100% and I invite you to give it a shot with your hardest scenes.
There's much more I could say about our system, but I invite you to check our website :
https://www.cgifarm.com
and our tutorials section :
https://www.cgifarm.com/renderfarm-how-to-use-tutorial
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach me out:
Skype: CGIFarm
Facebook: CGIFarm or Alex Gradea
The website chat: cgifarm.com .
I wish you the best and thanks for your time to check this new topic!
Alex
