Online Render Farms

[stusic]

If it becomes a reasonable possability, I may need to utilize the services of an online render farm. I create a lot of stills which, aside from the agonizing test renders (which has been solved with the addition of my new render node), worked okay even if they took four hours to render.

However, with the increasing demand for animations, my render times go up exponentially with each frame. I estimated the render time for my current project and, for 2700 frames (90 seconds) rendering at 1.5 minutes a frame, my render will take almost three days to finish.

What do you think of online render farms? Any you suggest? They seem to be mostly subscription-based services now, which turns out to be a better deal than per-scene...

Here's the one I've been suggested:

ResPower (http://www.respower.com/)

Thanks!

[dellis]

I've always found them to be crazy expensive...not to mention the whole plugin availability/compatability issue...for us anyway. Personally, i would suggest that if you are doing stills...utilize distributed rendering. I'm partial to VRay but mental ray has it as well. As for rendering animations....well....you could build up a few bared bones kits. They are generally way cheaper and you could just use them to render and nothing else.

[stusic]

Yep, I think you might be right -- $300 for a day of rendering... the upside is that if I start a render using the online farm I mentioned, I can finish my render even if the subscription expires. So, basically, $300 to render my animation. It's not terrible...

I am already thinking about adding to my mini-farm... I should be a lot easier than the initial setup. Depending on how this project winds up, I may have to use an online service once to buy me time to add to the farm.

[dellis]

Let me know what your deadlines are...i could probably render some out for ya at night here. we have a pretty decent farm...not small, but not huge either.

[stusic]

Let me know what your deadlines are...i could probably render some out for ya at night here. we have a pretty decent farm...not small, but not huge either.Thanks! If it comes down to it, I may need to take you up on that. I'd sure appreciate it. It'd be nice not to have to dumb-down the animation either... We've got a meeting this afternoon, after which I'll know exactly how long the animation is (I'm adding a narration) and how much time I've got left to do it. He's requested some additions to the scene, so I may be able to pad the time for that to allow for rendering...

I've already lined up a couple near-barebones systems to add to my farm, but I won't be able to set it up before this project's over.

Thanks Dwayne! :mrgreen: