Outsourcing to Render Farms - Can you recommend?

[rebusfarmandre]

Andre here Rebusfarm admin

 

thx for the kind words abouve and some side notes from me

 

 

 

at Rebus you have no waiting time - your job startmore less immidently (if there is waiting time the average is 20min only)

 

at Rebus you pay the used CPU time only - you NOT pay computer time

if your render use just 20% of CPU power you pay just 20% - noone else charge that way but Rebus do

 

at Rebus you can submit a job within seconds from inside your 3d application - you not need to care about textures, path , plugins and other details

if you can send the job to farm via Farminizer then farm can render the job correct for sure - you cant do wrong !

 

at Rebus we use 1200 cpu cores to render your still images distributed including GI

 

at Rebus you have 500 dual nodes a 24gb ram - 6000 cores total avaliable

 

Rebus do not charged for Hyperthreading like other farms do

 

at Rebus you not need to render GI solution to file for animations or distributed render

we can render all (Vray) IRR modes in the farm using all the farm

 

we have the best prices comparing to all other big farms

correct me if i am wrong

 

 

I need more feetback to opimise the farm

we are on market with Farminizer about 3 yeras but development never ends

everyone is welcome to register and test the farm - if you register you get 10 credits automaticly

send a test (a test mean 3 frames not 3000...) or a stillimage with about 3 hour rendertime on your pc

report any issues via mail or chat or post here

[RenderFlow]

I agree, I have always found GHz hours confusing. Is there a standard online calculator for calculating GHZ hours?

 

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

 

Hi, we recently saw your doubt and agree that the unit isn´t too clear to understand but it is useful for billing since it reflects how long a CPU with certain characteristics is working on your project. That is why it is commonly used. Another advantage is, and this is what the cost estimators are based in, that it allows to compare the render power of your local machine vs. the render power in a renderfarm. The outcome of this comparison is the time you save by using the farm instead of render locally and the cost it may generate. To test you could use our "Budget calc" at our webpage http://www.renderflow.com - there you can see how it works.

In any case it is an estimation. The real time consumption you´ll know when the render is finished since there might be issues in the scene like strange reflections etc. that may increase render time .... So keep in mind. The more control you have over your project, like pause, previews, etc. the better.

 

The task you described would be 2.6x4 (Ghz) x 1/6 (hrs) = 1.7333 GHzhrs - the hyperthreading makes it more complicated, therefore some renderfarms (like we) do not charge for hyperthread.

 

Why? Usually you will be charged e.g. 8x2.6 GHz although there are tasks which cannot be calculated in multi tasking and the "real" render power of a hyperthreaded machine is much less than the physical power (which will be charged). ++ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading look at "Performance".

 

An alternative to it is core/hr although for billing it is the same (1 core = 2.6 GHz ==> 4 core = 4x2.6 GHz)

 

Unfortunately by now, as it seems to us, nobody came up with a more user friendly model.

[benbil]

hi, check this out

 

http://www.ucscorp.com/render-farms-rentals/

[artmaknev]

I like rebusfarm as well, but not on distributed rendering, I think it is way overpriced when you use DR, the fee jumped by 5 times, I ended up paying $30 for a still image that took 15 minutes to render, it would take about 2 hours to render on single machine for $5. Of-course you pay for speed much more, but I would pay double and maybe triple, but not 5-6 times more..

[rebusfarmandre]

the longer the rendertime of your still image the better is the balance between rendertime and overhead

a render of 2 hour is not made for DR

at 5 hour++ we recomment to use DR

[stanleyadam]

I have past experience of working with XS CAD Pvt Ltd. Due to their branch office in India, the outsourcing is cost-effective and the work is delivered on time due to geographical differences. Also, I must say there was no compromise on quality even while delivering the work in short-span.

[Karl Larsen]

I just sent a 3000 x 1620 px render job to Rebus and triple checked every setting, ran their "smartcheck" and everything was perfect, and what I got back is completely unusable!!

 

Not only did I NOT get 2-render elements that were supposed to be saved as TGA's, but the PNG's I got back are 27720x7590px, AND, each image is a 10x10 array of the hoped-for image, only each arrayed image is cut in half!!!! And the same thing happened to each rendered element!

 

I just paid $70.00 US for this - after I ran their "estimating" routine that said the render should cost me around $15.00?????

 

I sent emails and I have my fingers cross that I did not just lose $70.00!

Edited August 27, 2013 by karlar

[dande]

I have used Rebus farm I found the plugin great but the support very poor. I have also used Render nation I found them great and the support and customer service great as well.

 

Overall I found render farms expensive. I find it cheaper to build my own render farm. You need to make sure everything is perfect before upload because rerendering is an additional cost.

 

I have also found it difficult to price into a job as you don't know how long the render is going to take at the pricing stage.

[Karl Larsen]

Well going from $15 dollars estimated on their website to a $70 bill is an astounding jump! Not to mention that what I got back is totally useless! When I got the images back I IMMEDIATELY checked my render setup to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. There is no way I would ever need a 27,720 px image.

 

What use could there possible be for am arrayed image of your rendering cut in half? I'm not even sure I can conceive how that could actually happen?

 

I ran a 640px test render prior to sending everything just to make sure all the elements were produced properly and saved to the desired location and it worked perfect -- the Rebus images are just incomprehensible how they turned out the way they did.

Edited August 27, 2013 by karlar

[Karl Larsen]

It's funny that the image array is 10X10 - 100-images that are cut in half, and while the job was processing Rebus Render managers said it was rendering on 100-machines...

 

Then when the job was all finished it said this:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]49957[/ATTACH]

 

I am just beside myself, I really wanted to get this finished!

Edited August 27, 2013 by karlar

[dande]

I have found that the calculators are not accurate. 1 frame might take a minute to render another frame might take 3 minutes.

[Karl Larsen]

My job was supposed to be a single image with 9-render elements.

[Karl Larsen]

Well I am very relieved. I just spoke to Gerph at Rebus and they have refunded the full cost of the render and are figuring out what went wrong. Whew - I did not get a good night sleep last night but I will tonight

 

I hope they can figure out what went wrong and we can get this working.

 

Thank you Gerph at Rebus Farm.

[Karl Larsen]

Alright,

 

Gerph instructed me to maximize the viewport (camera001) that is intended to be rendered (not have all 4 viewports visible) and resend the render - worked perfect and only cost $7.55US -- the only catch is that for reasons I do not understand, if I render the OBJECT ID's and MATERAIL ID's as .PNG's, they come out all black - so I used .TGA, but Rebus does not support .TGS...

 

They told me to spec .TIF for those 2 elements but that doesn't seem to work either.

 

I am stuck without those 2 elements -I wonder why they come out black as .PNGs?

 

Other than that, I think REBUS has been utterly fantastic with all they have done to help me get this working - I just need the 2 missing elements!

[Scott Schroeder]

Really? I use Rebus all the time and I always get my elements back as TGA's. It's easier to have your elements saved as whatever you are saving your base render as. Just let Vray and Max do the file format work for you.

 

Could it be that they are black to begin with, ie are you sure you have the ID's set? If not, it may just be easier to get the elements by rendering locally and just saving out the elements. Which you can just do with no GI, turn off textures, lights, shadows, displacement, reflections, etc, and a gray mat override. It should take 10-15 seconds to spit our your ID pass elements.

[Karl Larsen]

Actually, I was saving my Material and Oblect elements as 48-bit .PNG's -- on a hunch I changed them to 256 PNG's and just got them back from Rebus and they are perfect!

 

Rebus told me this AM they don't do .TGA's???

 

Don't ask me why I was using 48-bit .PNG's - that's what is said the first time I ever saved a render as a .PNG and it's been that way ever since :-D

 

For the price and the service they gave me, and the fantastic speed they turn stuff around, the only way anyone could beat them would be to do it free and send Selena Gomez over in a bikini to give me a full contact body-to-body massage

Edited August 27, 2013 by karlar

[Karl Larsen]

...it may just be easier to get the elements by rendering locally and just saving out the elements. Which you can just do with no GI, turn off textures, lights, shadows, displacement, reflections, etc, and a gray mat override. It should take 10-15 seconds to spit our your ID pass elements.

 

How to you get transparent leaf billboards to render correctly with a material override and no cutout?

 

I just noticed one other thing - when I save a .PNG here on my computer - it has a transparent ALPHA background. The .PNG's I received from Rebus have solid background and when I tried to make a separate ALPHA .PNG on Rebus it is almost totally white with a light grey outline???

Edited August 28, 2013 by karlar

[renderingfoxkrunnal]

You could look into Use renderFarm3d.net

Its very very cost effective and very good service.

 

The render process is pretty simple. You just have to send a link of your project file. The link can be your ftp downlad link, dropbox or any available solutions in the market. The necessary information like can be filled on the website renderfarm3d.net

 

A test render of 5 frames is sent to you for confirmation, free of charge. Post confirmation, the render process begins and a download link is sent to you.

 

The farm has over 800+ machines with over 24000 cores. Its the most cost effective render farm with lowest price in the market. $0.008/render minute. So basically if a frame takes 10 minutes to render on their machine you will be charged only $0.08 and so on.

Renderfarm3d.net is the only render farm that offers a Guaranteed render solution. In such scenarios the Render farm provide output in a stipulated time frame.