Cloud Render Farms for Vray

[rad_thundercat]

I'm sure this has been discussed, but for the life of me I couldn't find any threads on the subject.

 

Has anyone had any hands on experience with this? Ie, Rebus Farm, Zync. Heck, company from this list: http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vray_services.html

 

We use Vray and 3ds max (unfortunately Zync doesn't support Max yet). I guess I don't know exactly what my question is. How do these platforms work? Is there a drop down and I say, "ok send this job to Rebus Farm" and I get my 240 frames @1080p back in the morning? Do you get a 'quote' before you send off your job?

 

I've been experimenting with Autodesk's A360 cloud rendering and that is definitely NOT what we're looking for.

 

Does anyone feel that this cloud rendering technology is a bit in it's infancy and it makes more sense to buy local hardware instead?

 

Anyway, apologies if this post seems a bit scattered. I don't know where to start!

 

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

[Francisco Penaloza]

I use Rebus Farm from time to time. My experience with them it been great. This does not mean that I didn't have any problems, always there is something when you are dealing with animations but their customers support and over all technology works well.

Their software and system is very integrated with 3D Max or any of the other app they support; you can check your files before you submit them, you can download the Cinebench and compare your local workstation with theirs farm to get a pretty close idea how much you final price will be.

 

Before them I tried The Ranch farm ( think they are in France) it work fine, but by then their system felt older than compared to Rebus.

Other people may come with different opinions.

 

Regarding comparing a cloud farm with a local farm, to me it depend of your business, I work for an Architectural Firm, in my building there are about 200 computers so when I need to do animations I try to get as many computers I can here.

 

At home when I freelance I have 2 render computers besides my work station, if I need more rendering power I rather go with a cloud service instead of buying more machines. I don't have space, and the money invested Vs the power that I will need won't work for me.

 

My two cents.

[Scott Schroeder]

Same here with Rebus. Pretty much it was a very painless process to use it. However, you must must must must test your scene before you send to. If you render and realize you have flickering things, you just wasted your money. You also should get a quote using their cost estimator. When doing so, please be realistic. I usually add about 15-25% extra on and so far, I've never run out of credits. I'm usually done with just a few left over so my estimates have been pretty spot on if you use their system in a realistic way.

 

In my opinion, cloud rendering on a large scene scale won't really take off until internet service providers get off their roody-poo candy asses and stop throttling upload speeds or charging an astronomical amount for "business class" upload speeds.

[rad_thundercat]

Great information guys, thank you for sharing!

[martynadymek]

Hello there Andrew!

 

As you probably noticed, our render farm is also listed in the link you've provided - RenderBuzz.

I can walk you through our process of using our service, and I'm pretty sure it will be similar in other

farms mentioned.

 

To start using RenderBuzz services you should register and activate user account.

 

Use our calculator to estimate the render cost of your project, as Scott mentioned before, I also advise you to buy a little more rendering points than the calculations and make some test render before submitting main job.

To estimate time and cost, you have to provide the number of frames to render, average render time of one frame and your CPU model.

 

Then you can prepare and upload your project. In our service you can do this via dedicated plugin or manually (all needed manuals and plugin are placed in *downloads* section at our page).

 

Next step would be submiting your project to rendering queue.

 

In our service, you will receive an email after completion of rendering. Your rendered frames will be available for you to download from Dropbox or directly from our website.

 

For every new user there are some free rendering points given for testing purposes - that's the best way to see for yourself how the process is going.

 

If you'll have any questions, feel free to contact me, I'll be glad to provide you more informations in this subject.

[michalorganisciak]

Hi Everyone

 

I'd like to introduce you my render farm, Copernicus Computing render farm http://www.copernicuscomputing.com

We got full 24/7 support and also automatic uploading your scenes.

Don't worry about flickering, ew can prepare GI maps for you.

We are cheapest render farm on this planet .