good render farm?

[3di]

Can anyone recommend a good rendering farm?

Currently I use Pixelplow because there prices are incredibly low ($0.005 ghz!) and the results are perfect when it works.  The only problem is I intermittently get failed renders (slice errors) with corona.  Possibly because they use max's own strip rendering solution rather than DR, althrough last time it was due to the corona licencing service failing.

Here's what i'm looking for:

• price : $0.005 ghz
• automatic delivery of completed files
• ability to monitor render progress and increase cost per ghz / speed during render.
• ability to cancel render mid progress.
• ability to specify frames to render
• ability to specify maximum spend and to pause render if budget is exceeded

If they can provide the corona exr so I can resume render locally and tweak denoise that would be great.

Cheers

Michael.

[philippelamoureux]

Not sure about all your option but I know rebusfarm is pretty well integrated within 3ds max and it's easy to use!

[3di]

Naa, they're waaaay too expensive.

[Specto3d]

Have you checked https://www.renderbuzz.com?
They seem cheaper, and support Corona 1.4

[3di]

Cheers Specto, sounds ok.  Still 4x more expensive than pixel plow though unfortunately.

[3di]

I wonder if there's any way the corona community could start our own online free render farm, powered by us just making our pc's available for rendering when we are'nt using them?

[maru]

I wonder if there's any way the corona community could start our own online free render farm, powered by us just making our pc's available for rendering when we are'nt using them?

Who would pay the bills? ;)

[3di]

I leave mine on permanently anyway :). plus I pay way more in render farm charges than I do on electricity.

[Juraj]

I think there were numerous attempts at such utopia, 90perc. of those by Blender community. All failed for rather obvious reasons.

Keeping PC on, and keeping PC on working 100perc. are different things regarding electricity (and apartment heating :- )  ).

[FrostKiwi]

This has been done only once before on an acceptable and well manages scale, by the blender renderfarm.
They thought some big lessons about managing such endeavours.
The biggest problem is a centralized management hub. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of data would flow in, that have to be analyzed and distributed. And that's a steep and painful cost.
Electricity, hardware and an at least gigabit up and down connection costs being the least hard to get, but time, sweat and blood to setup and manage.

Volunteer PCs and "donating" your electricity bills will always be there, making it happen though... Doubtful.
If you wanna set it up... Your are welcome to do so, you have my PCs strength for sure :D

[mitviz]

Indeed it would be good, i keep both my pcs on all month n power bill rarely go above 100 usd per month, n i render so often even now all night n day with bb, just que stuff up n leave alot to render

[3di]

I guess we'd need to know how many subscribers corona has in order to get a good idea of server capacity requirements for a central hub.

My jobs average out at between 300-600mb each, so say disk capacity would need to be corona subscribers * 1gb (to be safe), 1 job stored per user at any one time.

First step would be to write the code to manage the data handling and node communication though, and then test on a smaller scale.

Perhaps corona should consider setting up/running the hub.....if this service was included with active licences I think it would be a good anti piracy measure, and definitely a competition killer if successful.

To encourage people to participate, maybe base available ghz hours on a % of how long the user has made their own computer available to the system.....say 500%.  So every time you leave your computer on for 10 hours overnight you would gain 50 hours acess to the communal nodes.