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Outsourcing to Render Farms - Can you recommend?


daniohayon
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Hi,

 

My office needs a new render farm to handle long animations and increasing amount of work. We are looking at few solutions and one of them is to simply outsource it to firms that just do that: renting render farms. Can I get some idea about the process from people that use this kind of service?

 

Is this reliable/fast?

How is the experience with this service in your work flow? How all the libraries/RPC/render assets/Proxies are used? Do you have to archive the whole thing for every render test and upload it?

 

Also, any recommendations for render farms you've worked before?

 

Many thanks guys,

Dani

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I've used http://www.remote-render.com/ and was pleased with customer service, and turn around time. They're pretty good about being communicative over skype which was important for me when explaining specific details or needs.

 

Only used them for large stills, so can't speak to animations, but I just archived the scene with desired render settings, and got scenes back with a couple hours most times, if it was a reasonable time of day. It was a bit of a drag to have to archive and upload every time, but their ftp is pretty speedy.

 

Good luck,

 

M-

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Rebus Farm is cool. They have a plugin that is integrated into Studio Max that automatically gathers assets and then it automatically transfers your animated and still frames back to a folder on your harddrive. I have used it a couple of times and it has worked well for us in deadline emergencys. It is pretty awsome to look and see that your file is being rendered by more than 100 computers at a time. I felt like George Lucas.

 

See http://www.rebusfarm.com/render-farm-home-ppc_en.html?gclid=CLOEr7Kks6YCFUdrKgodTma9oA

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I recently did about 4000 frames on Rebusfarm at video res, not HD. Each frame took 10 to 15 mins on a Q6600 here in the office. I'm pretty sure the whole lot was rendered in under two hours on Rebusfarm. It actually took longer to download the rendered files than it took to render them!!

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I've not used them yet but I'm going to try our Render Nation (http://www.rendernation.com/) next week for an animation I'm working on. I've chatted with them a couple of times, they seem to be very friendly and knowledgeable. They even bought a specific plug-in that they didn't have just so I can render my job! I'll let you guys know how I get on.

 

With regards to Rebusfarm, I've had no problems with their telephone support. I've only once not had them answer but they called me right back.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I recently did about 4000 frames on Rebusfarm at video res, not HD. Each frame took 10 to 15 mins on a Q6600 here in the office. I'm pretty sure the whole lot was rendered in under two hours on Rebusfarm. It actually took longer to download the rendered files than it took to render them!!

 

Craig, any chance your at liberty to say what this job cost? I'm setting up to do something similar, and curious what a job like this would run..

 

Ghz hours and all the jargon make my head spin a bit...

 

Thanks much,

 

M-

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....if I have a 10 minute frame on a quad hyperthreaded 2.6ghz Xeon chip, what does that mean in GHz hours?

 

ghz/ hr calculator... http://www.rebusfarm.com/rebusshop-2_en.html

 

or are you wondering how to calculate with the hyperthreading, not sure I've ever seen any sites with that incorporated into the options.....

Edited by BrianKitts
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  • 4 months later...
  • 2 months later...

i think it really depends on what you want.

Fox Render Farm has great customer service,

and to be honest, it is very fast, also the price is ok.

but it only supports 3ds Max and Maya rendering

and the download speed sometimes is slow.

as to other render farms like Respower and Render Rockect,

they can supports more than these two rendering.

but it's more expensive and maybe the customer service isn't that good.

so i guess every render farm has its own good and bad.

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  • 8 months later...

We have used Render Nation several times now and have had absolutely superb service from them, especially when tight deadlines are concerned. Every time I needed to speak to someone I was given a direct line to them, and they would always phone up to let us know if there were any problems before they hit render, rather than using hours & hours of the render farms time to produce results that would have to be re-done.

 

As mentioned before the transferring of files is generally the tedious part, but their FTP is very fast. Great value for money imho.

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Agree

Respower and render rocket are fast and supporting lots of softwares

Fox Render Farm and render core are cheaper

I also heard that Lenovo is planning to set up a render farm,too

More and more render farms now!good news

 

i think it really depends on what you want.

Fox Render Farm has great customer service,

and to be honest, it is very fast, also the price is ok.

but it only supports 3ds Max and Maya rendering

and the download speed sometimes is slow.

as to other render farms like Respower and Render Rockect,

they can supports more than these two rendering.

but it's more expensive and maybe the customer service isn't that good.

so i guess every render farm has its own good and bad.

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Niall,

 

I used to use Rebusfarm loads (before investing in my own setup here) and they were great. The plugin for 3ds max works as though you simply have your own renderfarm sitting under your desk, and as for high res stills yes it is configured for distributed rendering.

 

My main advice is to be sure your scene/image is working correctly before you submit to render so that you dont return half and hour later and get a nasty suprise from a cost perspective! The guy who runs it is usually very helpful if you have made a mistake anyhow. It isnt manned 24hrs a day though, if you wanted this type of service then perhaps consider Render Nation in Liverpool who have people there 24hrs a day.

 

Good luck.

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