Author Topic: Affordable Render Farm Services  (Read 1396 times)

2023-03-13, 21:32:11

BigAl3D

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I know there are some posts about farms, but they're all over the place and many are very old.

I have some architectural type animations I need to do. Static room and simple, slow camera moves. It's just too much for my old iMac Pro. A 10 second move can easily be 24 hours with moderate number of passes and denoising. There is a long list of farm services on Corona's web site. It's a little daunting. So far, Rebus is the only site that I can input my exact CPU. The others I have to guess a comparable chip and fingers crossed.

For Corona peeps that have used farms, what is your top five companies I should look at for price/performance? I assume I'll have to be careful with shared textures and the Corona Bitmap problem.

The other question is, I have been using the daily builds, but not using any specific feature of v10. In the past, I have rendered newer Corona version on nodes with a lesser version of Corona without problem. I'm sure I could go back to v9 and save again. Thanks for any advice.

2023-03-13, 21:50:20
Reply #1

davetwo

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Farms will definitely not support dalies. Best to save and send using an official release.
I only have limited experience with farms TBH - but I found Garagefarm.net pretty good when I needed something doing.

2023-03-14, 00:12:09
Reply #2

BigAl3D

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Appreciate the tip.

2023-03-14, 16:13:17
Reply #3

bnji

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Hi there,
Definitely always use a stable official release because render farms are picky about using dailies and won't provide much assistance if you're using a daily build to submit a rendering job to their systems, as @davetwo already mentioned.
Every render farm service has built its own pipeline, which in some cases will require you to prepare things according to their workflow in order to get an expected result.
This is an interesting post; I'm wondering about other users' experiences using this type of service around the globe.
Looking forward to reading all your posts.
Kind regards.
Benjamin Rosas | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Specialist - Corona | contact us
Corona Uploader l Upload

2023-03-14, 22:19:51
Reply #4

ficdogg

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Im using Rebus for animations and for large-resolution stills. It does have its quirks but is unmatched in ease of use.
A while back I went on a mission to find something better, tried a whole bunch of farms, and the others were a huge pain in the ass to work with.

For animations there's a built-in estimator, you send the job, it renders 3 frames and gives you an estimate on the whole job and it's fairly accurate if you don't have dramatic changes in lighting during the shot.

It's far from perfect, but I've probably spent 10k+ over the last few years on Rebus and the experience hasn't been perfect but it's mainly OK. There's almost always someone to reply to chat support requests.

You should have some free points with your corona subscription, it's probably worth a try.

2023-03-15, 01:01:22
Reply #5

BigAl3D

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I have read good things about Rebus and their estimator was the best one I've tried so far. Since I'm on a Mac and can almost never find an equivalent CPU to match, their option of use a Cinebench score fixed that problem.

I was unaware about free credits with my sub. Where would I find those?

Also, what's the store with the Chaos farm solution? I don't think it's available for Cinema 4D yet, but wondering if the costs would be competitive. Frankly, theirs should be cheaper since it would be a value added service to spending all that money on subscriptions. Just a thought, but a pipe dream I'm sure.

2023-03-15, 08:28:56
Reply #6

Beanzvision

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Rebus no longer provide free credits with our subscriptions. They discontinued this long ago. This was their decision, not ours.
Bengamin Jerrems l chaos-corona.com
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2023-03-15, 19:00:05
Reply #7

BigAl3D

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Looks like they give you the credits directly on their end.

"As a new user you will receive a free trial of 25 RenderPoints worth 26.84 $ which will be automatically added to your account right after your registration."

2023-03-16, 15:51:31
Reply #8

HFPatzi

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Hey,

we mainly use rebus. But we tried Drop&Render lately. It's fairly cheap i guess and it has a pretty good cost estimate. You can either chose your computer configuration but also type in the cinebench points of your system for cost estimation.
Maybe thats another solution for you.

Greetings,
Moritz

2023-03-20, 14:45:39
Reply #9

Konichowaa

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I use Ranchcomputing since several years. Good results and good service too.

It works with a checker-plugin to make/send a project archive with textures to the farm, and alerts you for the most common errors and warnings. Some testing is required though and some rules to put on your checklist before sending, in order to get an expected result without missing textures etc. .
There is also quite good support for plugins on different C4D versions.

The main reason I switched from rebus to ranchcomputing is the feature for corona to render with a noise treshold and/or time limit, so which reaches first... (I'm not sure if rebus supports this feature these days. I also admit that I was very pleased with Rebus support and follow progress on mobile app!)
e.g. my renders mostly render on 4000px width, noise 3.8 or a maximum of 1.5h of rendering (on the farm). The 1.5 hours rendering is aproximately 5 euros per image then (depending on the extra preparation time, but the time limit is a good guard for budgetcontrol)
there are besides standardnodes with 128GB also 256Gb RAM for large scale projects and it offers different rates for the number of nodes and priority you require.

PS: You can get volume discount throughout the year but my personal tip is to buy annual renderpoints on black friday, to get even more complemetary points ;-)
Koen Van haesendonck
3D-lab - www.3d-lab.be