Rendering Farm Charges

[chapmandu]

Hi all,

 

What would be considered a "fair charge" for rendering farm use? We just recently rendered approximately 60,000 frames for a client of ours, and I'm struggling with what that should cost.

 

We typically only use our farm for projects we have modelled, but we made an exception for this existing client.

 

To give specific information, we devoted 20 of our cpu's to this particular project (avg cpu - PIV, 2GHZ or better, with min. of 512 mg ram). There were 15 individual models, all under 50,000 faces each. In each model we renderred approx. 4,000 frames. We logged approx. 30 hours of CPU time (again, that would mean that 20 cpu's were tied up for 30 hours).

 

From what I've seen so far, in the few places I've found, most firms will charge a fee, per cpu hour.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks,

 

Jon

[Reitveld]

I have thought about this a great deal and have also had a number of conversations regarding this issue.

 

It seems that if you have one machine and its rendering then you can not use it for anything else… and the client should pay for that down time. Pulling that logic outward, if you buy several machines then someone must pay for those machines. It seems that the number of hours they are pushed a year needs to be distributed across all your clients.

 

My office and others I’ve talked to say they compute the cost of the machines over a 2 year period, divided by the number of hours they are used. Overhead (power, routine maintenance, and upgrades, etc.) and then a small profit margin are added it to finalize that fee.

 

This fee is much lower than the fee for when YOU (a thinking, creating human) use the machine… though if the fee is set toooo low you will have clients wanting animations done over just because they don’t like the shade of blue you used in the sky.

 

My office does very few animations so overnight rendering is not an issue most of the time. As such we normally work in the rendering time price into our lump sum fee. Depending on the project size it can factor in as anywhere from $15-35/hour. I’m not really sure if this is too low or not, but its what we do.

 

I would love to know what others charge.

[chapmandu]

Your response seems very logical. :ngesmile: I like the approach of integrating overhead into the equation (something to often over looked).

 

To be honest, everything I have heard so far (on this site and several others) has been much lower than I had anticipated. orangesad

 

My first reaction in terms of what to charge was $10/cpu hour. So, if 20 cpu's were tied up for 25 hours, that would be a charge of $5,000.00. That may seem high, but if you put my clients needs into perspective (it was the 11th hour, they needed 60,000 frames done in 2 days).

 

I think there should be some sort of a set up charge applied as well. This was not a simple "load it up and run it" project. There were IFL files and custom materials and drive mappings we had to deal with as well.

 

Does anyone know of any companies out there that actively look for this type of work?

 

Thanks,

 

Jon

[quizzy]

go here:

 

http://www.3dlinks.com/services_rendering.cfm

[chapmandu]

Thank you Michiel. Your link was helpful. Though some of the related pages seemed a bit outdated, it at least gives me a starting point.

 

Jon