A simple render farm setup

[Tommy L]

 

I wish to ask you the same as I did with Crazy Homeless Guy... "What type of complexity are your renders, and how long do they take with the solutions you have in place now, if you don't mind me asking?"

 

Im not typical of these boards, Im more product than arch-vis nowadays and Im a sole operator...

I do animations for Chevy, product renderings and some arch-vis, latest big one being the Ritz Carlton in Chicago. That was a huge file, every brick modeled. The car jobs are fairly high poly and I recently had to model a folded sequin dress, which was very high res and one of the heavier scenes Ive worked on. What it comes down to is scene management. You are dealing with visuals, not engineering and fooling the eye happens in every project. Some of my longest render times have come from the simplest scenes. eg Im rendering some test tubes with blood in them now for a medical client. Its taking around 3 hrs using my whole farm DR (8 x i7 2600k). Im also working on some countryside residential images, loads of (Onyx) trees and foliage and Vray proxy makes it super slick, like 20 mins at high res

I think the best rule of thumb in this business is buy the least you can be efficient with and upgrade when you must. Any thing you purchase comes out of your bottom line.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

There will be times when we all'll be laughing about rendering from RAM+CPU ) but who want to stand in a line waiting.. ? BTW what are oldest PCs you harvest to do work? I think there is lower edge of line when there older machines are contra-productive.. eg you waiting too long for frame to finish..

 

Yep. What are the high end graphics cards at these days? 3gb? 6gb? ...the one I am using only has 768mb .

 

I should mention that I work at a large architectural firm which is why I have access to so many computers in the evening hours. Our office leases all of our workstations, this means that no computer in the office is ever more than 2 years old. That said, our standard setup for Revit users is a Dell 3500 with a quad core 3ghz Xeon w/ 12gb of RAM. So luckily I don't have lag in old farm machines.

[First CG Architect]

Not a problem... As for complexity. The majority of our models originate in Revit, and then are moved to Max for visualization and rendering. The projects cover a broad range; Airports/Healthcare/Judicial/Mixed Use/Etc.. This means the models are usually large and heavy. I don't know the poly counts, but Max is usually eating somewhere between 6gb and 11.5gb of RAM.

 

For rendering we use Vray with approximately dedicated quad core Xeon machines for the farm.

 

Renderings are typically 4,000 to 5,000 pixels wide, and take 50-90 minutes when distributed across 3 or 4 machines. It all depends on complexity, but those are average numbers for our typical projects.

 

When we rendering an animation we expand the farm to all of the CPU's we can after everyone leaves for the evening. We topped the farm out a couple of months ago at 960 CPU cores. They were Quad core Xeons that were hyperthreaded, so think of it as 480 physical CPU cores and 480 Hyperthreaded CPU cores. Which translates to 120 physical computers.

 

I should also mention that GPU rendering isn't really an option when your scenes tend to be the size that we are currently faced with. Your entire model, plus textures, and I believe room for the rendered image need to be able to fit on the physical RAM of the graphics card.

 

 

Very nice, and also demanding requirements, but to have 960 CPU Cores on tap after hours is awesome, truly. What length animations do you run to disperse to all 960 Cores, and how long does it take?

 

 

 

 

Im not typical of these boards, Im more product than arch-vis nowadays and Im a sole operator...

I do animations for Chevy, product renderings and some arch-vis, latest big one being the Ritz Carlton in Chicago. That was a huge file, every brick modeled. The car jobs are fairly high poly and I recently had to model a folded sequin dress, which was very high res and one of the heavier scenes Ive worked on. What it comes down to is scene management. You are dealing with visuals, not engineering and fooling the eye happens in every project. Some of my longest render times have come from the simplest scenes. eg Im rendering some test tubes with blood in them now for a medical client. Its taking around 3 hrs using my whole farm DR (8 x i7 2600k). Im also working on some countryside residential images, loads of (Onyx) trees and foliage and Vray proxy makes it super slick, like 20 mins at high res

I think the best rule of thumb in this business is buy the least you can be efficient with and upgrade when you must. Any thing you purchase comes out of your bottom line.

 

 

Not bad by any means, I checked out your blogspot links, impressive indeed, especially the boiler breakdown. Do you rent space or work from home with all of that electricity usage?

 

Also, a folded sequin dress... I feel your pain, at least it is not a bad as a super extravagant wedding dress heheh.

 

 

 

Yep. What are the high end graphics cards at these days? 3gb? 6gb? ...the one I am using only has 768mb .

 

I should mention that I work at a large architectural firm which is why I have access to so many computers in the evening hours. Our office leases all of our workstations, this means that no computer in the office is ever more than 2 years old. That said, our standard setup for Revit users is a Dell 3500 with a quad core 3ghz Xeon w/ 12gb of RAM. So luckily I don't have lag in old farm machines.

 

I would love to have access those network nodes, that would be a dream. One day and with patience it will be so.

 

Regarding video memory, I remember when the Matrox Millennium G200 AGP with 8MB SGRAM (1998) was costly back then at $230... yet 768MB of memory is the low-end of today's powerhouses hahahaha.

 

Technology...