Fox Render Farm review

[stayinwonderland]

Just started using Fox Render Farm. Pretty cheap, fairly quick to set up and fairly quick customer support.

 

But... once you've submitted a job, even with a support dude chatting on Skype, there is NO chance of knowing whether your render will take 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 10 hours. No estimated time of delivery whatsoever.

 

Is this normal when using render farms?

[Jonathan Fantucchio]

He never said that it was quick overall, only that it was quick to set up. I would love to see comprehensive no BS reviews of the major outsourced render farms.

[stayinwonderland]

Angilia, your post reads like an advert.

 

They have two options, one normal single frame render and one where the frame is split into strips of 10 or 20 and each strip is sent to its own render node.

 

Option 1: my computer = 8 hours, their render service = 8 hours.

Option 2 (10 strips): my computer = 8 hours, theirs = 2 hours.

 

So unless you choose the strips option, it's LITERALLY pointless.

 

That cost me about $10 for each render. 3000px wide on quite high settings. I assume it would take half as long if you chose the 20 strips one.

 

Straight after my first render the guy skype messaged me to see how I was getting on, that was nice.

[Scott Schroeder]

Online render farms are hard to justify for still images, unless you have a ton of them and you need them quickly.

 

Rebus render farm has a time estimator, which is why it is and always will be better than Fox. It's as close as it can get given the different variables between their farm and your own personal system. They told be it would be about a day for a full 6 minute animation and I got all my frames in pretty much that time frame.

 

Plus, Rebus doesn't have it's cronies putting out ad posts every time a thread on this subject comes up like Fox does.

[stayinwonderland]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look up rebus and see what they're about.

[QuakeMarine1]

Plus, Rebus doesn't have it's cronies putting out ad posts every time a thread on this subject comes up like Fox does.

 

lol :-D

greez from Rebus CEO ;-)

Edited February 16, 2013 by QuakeMarine1

[Jeff Mottle]

Yes, I'm getting a bit tired of trying to chase their threads down and moderate their actions. It's simply getting out of control. I've had to ban quite a few of their staff for incessant spamming despite asking them to stop. Please use the triangle icon on each thread to report abuse from them or anyone else that tries to use the forums abusively to promote their wares.

[Msamir]

+1 for Rebus we've used them to render 3 animations, fast and very quick customer support.