Is cloud rendering a good solution for...

[philippelamoureux]

for a 1 man viz studio?

 

I'm about to get my first contract and I only have 1 computer at the moment. I cannot continue to work if I have to render. Ideally I would have multiple computers at home (a farm). But for now, I was wondering, Is cloud rendering a good solution to use on a frequent basis or the cost are still kinda high?

 

I'm not an expert at optimization yet. My computer is an i7 2600k, 8gb of ram (should upgrade soon) and a gtx 670. I have a hard time estimate what a standard still image would cost if i'd use a cloud rendering service.

 

Thank you for the help!

[Devin Johnston]

I think the price is acceptable when rendering out stills but you really won't know what it costs until you do it. Of course if you do these all the time then it's going to be cheaper to have your own machines in the long run.

[Fooch]

I would invest in a few more cheap DIY build it yourself boxes (ala, high ram.. bang for the buck processor, and strip everything out) and upgrade your own box.

Worth every penny.

 

plus invest in a good backup system.. a local NAS. Get to good backup habits.

oh buy a decent HUB too. I learnt it the wrong way. (Kept buying hubs after hubs as we increased in sized. should have gone for the big best ones at the beginning .. would have saved me heaps)

[jasond]

I just set up a render farm with Amazon EC2 to render out 13,500 frames... I did the comparison with Rebus and several other services but they were all FAR more expensive than what I ended up paying for EC2. It takes work to get it up and running but once you get the hang of it and understand how the bidding structure and systems to choose from works, you're good to go. There's a small ongoing fee to keep the machine image available but its only around $20/month or less if you tinker with their API, which I haven't done yet.

 

It's a tossup, you don't own EC2 so you're constantly paying however with your own farm, you have plenty of maintenance and the cost for electricity to consider. If I bought all the nodes I created on EC2, I'd easily be in over $15-20k.

[Stephen Hughes]

very interesting Jason, were you able to estimate a rough cost per frame using the amazon EC2 setup against the time taken per frame on your main workstation?

Edited September 23, 2014 by stephenhughes99

[Sketchrender]

I would be interested to know how that works.

Could you give a breakdown of the process Please.

 

Thank you

 

Phil

[Devin Johnston]

I'd like to know what the actual costs were as well Jason, I think it would be a great resource to have incase you needed it. I wonder if you'd be willing to share how you set it up?

[Scott Schroeder]

In case anyone is planning on attending Autodesk University this year in Las Vegas, there is a seminar on this very subject.

 

I used Jud Pratt's videos as a guide when I set one up a year ago.

They should still be generally relevant to what you'll see on Amazon today, but check all of the current Amazon docs first.

 

One thing that I can't stress enough, and Jud doesn't push it hard enough in my opinion, is to do your initial testing on the cheapest possible hardware. That way as you take the time to figure things you are aren't burning through money. When you get it working, you can instance up that install to much more powerful nodes and start your rendering.

[Stephen Hughes]

I found these videos online which give a bit of an insight to the process (only watched the first few myself...)

 

 

but again, it seems like a sizeable enough area to delve into without knowing ballpark costs. If anyone with first hand experience of it was generous enough to work out a rough cost per frame of say:

 

single workstation = i7 3930k processor @ 30mins render x 1000 frames = 500 hrs

renderfarm = rendernow.co.uk = £394.11 ($591.17) for same 1000 frames = £0.39 per frame

amazon ec2 = ??

[jasond]

Hi all,

 

Scott is definitely right in that you need to set things up on low-end machines as cost can really get away on you if you aren't careful. I had a situation where I forgot I had open spot requests during peak time that ran for hours unattended... that was a fast lesson learned.

 

Anyways, I used Judd Pratt's videos as a basis for setup. I think he set up a Dropbox to transfer files but that's a horrible waste of time! Create an OpenVPN connection to the 'manager in the cloud' and just map a drive to it... I ended up storing the file and material sources on the manager node's share drive to speed things up. There are all kinds of logistical issues when using Backburner, a few of which I haven't solved but it's generally workable for production. Cloud DBR is my next project to tackle.

 

My work computer is sorely slow so there was no way I could render my last project on it... would have taken a year. Average frame time on their 32 vCPU 60GB RAM Intel Xeon E5-2680 Ivy Bridge machines was between 3 and 8 minutes depending on what was being rendered. I ran up to 30 of those as "spot instances" at varying times plus the BB manager on a low-end machine and it came to around $500 USD for 13,500 frames. Works out to under $0.04/frame.

 

That brings me to another important point, always use spot instances if at all possible! They are way cheaper than if you were to just spawn a regular instance, you just have to be aware that someone can outbid you and your node is terminated. There are ways to auto-bid and spawn new ones but I haven't got into the API yet for that.

[Noise]

I setup a single free instance on AWS for other purposes and found it quite complex - how you get them to render Max and Vray files is beyond me, do you have to setup max and vray on one of their machines ?

[jasond]

A render farm on their free tier would take forever to render... I'm afraid those machines are useless for this purpose.

 

You need to install max on every machine you intend to render on. Then you map a drive on the render nodes to the backburner manager instance.

[Noise]

The free instance I setup was for another purpose which isn't processor intensive and yes the spec of that free instance is very basic and not for 3D rendering.

 

How many machines did you install max and vray on ? What was your setup time on the whole process ? I assume it will be quicker next time for you.

Edited November 27, 2014 by Noise

[jasond]

I've been using Mental Ray for my network render jobs so far, so no licensing to worry about. I might use Vray on the next project which would have to use some sort of central license server I'm assuming... likely just the backburner manager machine.

 

Depending on the instance type you choose, I think you have can up to 20 nodes set up at a time. You have to manually request an increase should you need more...

 

Jason