Render farm Options

[Graphite]

Hey Guys/Gals

 

Have a question about my render farm options.

I'm looking into a project that would require significant amounts of render time (11) 2-minute animations). And was curious if it would be beneficial to purchase my own hardware, or kick it to a farm like Rebus.

 

I've budgeted about 20k to farm out the project, but I want to make sure I'm going to spend the money in the right place. I've looked into Boxx machines, but looking at it in terms of cost vs cores I cant justify spending 20k on say 2 Render pro's that only give me 48 cores.

 

Anyone have any suggestions? I've looked around but honestly the info out there doesn't help much.

[neil poppleton]

Our render farm consists of around 10 pc's. Each pc has lots of ram and a good processor, therefore reasonably cheap boxes, no graphics cards needed for farming.

You can use for distributed rendering aswell if vray.

Simple but effective solution.

Also keeps the office nice and warm in winter....

[Dimitris Tolios]

If you won't get your hands dirty building your own, you won't be able to do much better than BOXX with commercially available solutions.

[Scott Schroeder]

If this is a rare job for you, then you'll waste your money buying your own render farm as those machines will sit idle. If you can justify their use on non-animation jobs then you might want to look into buying your own. BOXX are nice machines, but you do pay extra $$$$ for the name. If you don't want to build your own, look at local PC shops to build them for you. They do good work for a lot less than BOXX or Dell.

 

If this is truly a once in a blue moon type of job, then you are better of using an online farm or EC2.

[Dimitris Tolios]

There are also some companies that rent equipment weekly or monthly.

I don't know how easy it would be for you to rent them for 1-2 months, then return them.

 

 

I have Bell Technologies in mind - local to where I'm at - but you might find something relevant closer to you.

[padre.ayuso]

Try WorkStation Specialists in UK, I bought two machines once about 6 years ago and they have not gone down once. They are even better than two HP that I bought for the same price at a later date. They will also make sure you get what you need. They are not that expensive, but a bit out of my budget right now, so if anyone knows any other good places in the US let me know.