Render Drive and Pure

[Sketchrender]

Hi

I have been talking to a guy,who swares by these products.

It shoots through renders, scan linemind you but still, he can turn out some lovely work.

A big investment though, £7000 sterling for the drive , and £1800 for the pure card.

 

 

Can anybody tell me is it worht it.

Also

 

Is 3d studio max set up to render across a lot of computers or is there an additional purchase required, ie addtional liciences or plug-ins.

 

What are the most essential plug-ins for the architectural business with max.

 

regards

 

phil

[Brian Cassil]

The renderdrives and pure cards have been discussed at length on these forums before. A quick search should bring them up. As far as I can remember it came down to a matter of opinion on whether they were worth the money or not.

 

Network rendering (rendering frames across many computers) is freee with max. Distributed (multiple computers rendering a single image) rendering is possible in native max if using mental ray to render with, but not possible in scanline.

 

Most essential plugins? A lot of people use a rendering plugin such as V-ray, Final Render, or Brazil but they are by no means essential. RPC is another popular plugin for adding trees, people, cars, and other entourage to your scenes. RPC is especially handy for using in animations.

 

I hope this helps!

[Brolloks]

Apart from being able to split an animation rendering across different machines you can select to render selected camera views on different machines too.

 

Good and fast pc's get cheaper by the day and sotware running on that is adaptable. Buying hardware that can only render feels like a limiting option. How upgradeable is the renderdrive? Rendering and lighting technology change and software can be upgraded, but can you do the same with dedicated rendering hardware? It would be sad if an investment of that size is obsolete in a year or to.

 

Just a thought.

 

I just did a search for "render drive" and yes everything has actually been said about it

[luckytohaveher]

I absolutely love renderdrive technology. It is unparalleled in performance, results, and speed. It is a dream.

 

However, it is rigid and inadaptable. As a result, you are pretty much limited to the options they have. Two huge limitations are Global Illumination and RPCs. In my test RPCs cross cancel the acceleration gain of the box and you are back to 1x speed (similar to one PC). The more RPCs the slower.

 

If, and when, ARTVPS comes out with a new processor core that addresses today rendering issues and incorporates the latest concepts I will be looking it over.

[Devin Johnston]

I was in the same boat as you are now, I was looking for some speed increase so I had to choose between the Render Drives or a third party plug in "Final Render". I liked the Render Drive and for $13,000 I was promised a speed increase of up to 30 times what I was currently working at. The pure card was cheaper only $3,500 but I only got a speed increase of 16 times my current speed. Only problem was that you could only have one card in your computer. Either way that was a significant increase, problem with this option is you have to use their materials and lights in order to get the speed increase, and render drive and pure doesn’t work with all plugins.

We actually went with Final Render because it does distributed rendering so I could split one image up and let 10 CPUs render a scene. I can also use it with Max network rendering which was difficult with the Render Drive. It cost us about the same as the Render Drive and I get about a 80% increase in speed over what I was previously using.

[luckytohaveher]

If you need to scale up -- just go pick up some more pizza boxes and a couple of shrink wrapped boxes and you are done...

 

Vray can actually scale a single scene beyond ten to twenty or thirty boxes. Of course that only pays off on really large scenes or really complicated ones.

[Devin Johnston]

That's one thing about Final Render that I hope will change, being limited to only 10 CPU's seems to be a little short sited by the Cebas guys.

[mtutaj]

I was told by someone at cebas that you can purchase seperate rendering licenese so that you can go past the 10cpu limit. I think you need to talk to edwin I believe.. but I have heard of more then just 10cpus with FR.

 

Mike

[Devin Johnston]

I'll talk to him and see what he says, but I've posed the same question on their forum before and was told you can only have 10 cpu's.

[Craig Ramsay]

Last time I heard you could buy extra licenses for FR but after 20 CPU's you wont see any speed increase in distributed rendering.

 

Craig

[luckytohaveher]

The more you want to distribute the rendering the more the networking and file server performance get important. If you don't have it setup correctly, all the stations will just be waiting for data and producing nothing...

 

If you have a single server with 100baseT and a simple raid, 10 licenses is all the licenses you will need.

 

Usually you don't get performance benefits beyond 20 systems without a tricky network setup. You will need full gigabit or preferably bridged dual gigabit ethernet with a fast raid server and the supporting switches and cables.

 

To go to 30 stations you will need the server to have multiple seperate bridged dual gigabit channels and optimally a large RAM drive for the location of your rendering job files (MAPS and RPCs ESPECIALLY!). I would recommend three seperate mini sub-networks with 10 stations each through 3 2-port bridged gigabit channels from the server. This can get a little nebulous but it is REALLY important. Multiple CPUs and server rendering cards, with built-in hardware based packeting (Intel for example), are a must for the server.

 

Just remember when you send the job all of the data is requested by all of the machines AT THE SAME TIME! Imagine a snake trying to eat 3 goats at once. It ain't pretty... I had a friend go through 3 NIC cards in 3 years due to the load.

 

I saw an example where 30 rendering machines where improved over 100% (overall) in rendering speed by just replacing the network hubs from 100baseT to gigabit (single channel).

 

VRAY, FR, and others support the multiple licenses to super-size the scale.

[Devin Johnston]

I looked into it, you can buy an Unlimited license for about $2000, not sure if it's worth it. Right now they don't have a way to buy individual licenses for individual CPU's.

[luckytohaveher]

VRAY will do it. I think the price is $800 for one and $1600 for two. Check with them...