Chaos Corona Forum

Chaos Corona for 3ds Max => [Max] General Discussion => Topic started by: Bormax on 2015-10-09, 08:19:34

Title: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-09, 08:19:34
Hi guys,
In nearest future we'll need to render quite big amount of hi-rez stills in short time and it's clear that we have to use some commercial render farm for that. We have to make a choice which farm we are going to use and my question to you is - which render farm do you use for your renders? Would be interesting to know also did you have any problems with render farms and what kind of problems you have had?
I will be very grateful for any information about your experience in using a render farms.
Thanks!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: juang3d on 2015-10-09, 09:42:36
In our case we use our own farm, it pays for itself and we have it always without being worried about surprise costs even when we have to re-render any that had a problem or an error.

In your case, probably Rebus will do the trick, we used some time in the past and it worked ok, the problem was the cost estimation, it turned out to be more expensive than what their calculator say, but for still it could be more precise, I don't know, it's a guess.

Cheers!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-09, 10:20:42
Thanks for reply juang3d!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Alessandro on 2015-10-09, 11:48:06
I've worked with Render4you, I find they have a good service at a good price, and a very good support. We calculated some animations, each frame a cup of minutes, actually I don't know how they works with large still. Some years ago we decide to buy a little renderfarm for distribute render for our large still, and to use web renderfarm just for animations, because the price for large still is very high. I think the best way is to contact directly the guy in Render4you, I remember they were working on a solution for large still, maybe they can help you.

all the best!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-09, 12:14:19
Thanks Alessandro!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Juraj on 2015-10-09, 12:14:45
Rebus. For stills it's super convenient. 2 clicks and great cost.

Animation probably doesn't matter, it never comes cheap....
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: olejka2k on 2015-10-09, 12:35:48
Amazon AWS.
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-09, 12:46:15
Thanks for replies Juraj and olejka2k!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: arqrenderz on 2015-10-09, 13:45:21
Amazon AWS.

Any tutorial on how to setup amazon AWS ??
And your experienceusing it??
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: tomislavn on 2015-10-09, 16:47:51
Using REBUS for last year and a half for my stills. Working great :) - their app is quite good!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: andreu.taberner on 2015-10-09, 21:21:43
I've used REBUS for stills too.
Great service and integration so far.
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-12, 10:42:14
Thank you guys for your replies!
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: JezUK on 2015-10-21, 20:37:31
Rebus have changed the way I work.

For stills, a few clicks, superfast broadband has my projects uploaded and they hit my stills with 100nodes.

I have one machine and Rebus have made me question whether I need a home renderfarm at all.

PS - I don't do animations.
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: arqrenderz on 2015-10-21, 23:03:04
My stills just use 10 Nodes on rebus, is it becouse of the payment for higher tiers?
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Juraj on 2015-10-21, 23:43:22
I get 25 :- D I do economy all the time.
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: filipskrzat on 2015-10-22, 00:07:38
Also 25 render nodes :) economy always
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-24, 07:09:24
Thank you for your replies!
I also get 25 render nodes when I tried Rebus Farm. I used economy too
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: EarthMover on 2015-10-27, 20:11:45
I've rendered about 100 stills through Rebus in the past 6 weeks with Corona and Max.  I use mostly a single PC per still on their end which is still twice as fast as my hexacore and cost almost half of what distributed rendering costs.  (Economy)  The wait time to get into a single machine is never more than a few minutes.  The beauty is I can 10+ individual shots uploaded and rendering all at the same time over 10 different machines.  For high volume projects it saves me a ton of time.  Test renders  at 2-3K size are usually under $1 a piece.  My 4K finals at 150 passes are usually only 5 RP on a single machine and take just under and hour.  I've had up to a dozen stills running at once on single machines.  The downside to single machine rendering is that there is no option to resume a render to clean up noise as with distributed. 

I've had a few issues with the Rebus Drop hanging between upload and getting queued, while processing more than one upload at a time, but a simple close and relaunch of the app flushes it out without a problem.   I've never had it fail or have any issues with plugins. 

I've also found with Rebus that, since they store all the scene assets on their server, by creating proxies for all of the non structural scene items, you only have to upload those once.  The more you reduce your file size via proxies, the faster the upload time. (after the initial upload to store the proxies on their server)  For example I just worked on a scene that was 700MB  unpacked (500+ textures and lots of high poly plants) but got it down to under 12MB by converting all the heavy items to Corona Proxy.  The initial upload was 3 hours, but after that, every upload was only a few minutes.  With Corona Proxy, Rebus now feels more like having a home farm and takes away the bottleneck of uploading times

I couldn't be happier with RebusFarm. 
Title: Re: Which render farm do you use?
Post by: Bormax on 2015-10-28, 11:08:26
Thank you very much EarthMover for so detailed information about your experience in using a Rebus Renderfarm! I didn't think about advantages of using rendering on single PC, and always though about distributed rendering. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks!
One question about Rebus farm I have in my mind - if I have for example 5 cameras in one scene and for pictures from each of them I have to switch on/off some lights, or move objects, or something like that, should I save files with different names for each camera, or I can send file with settings for 1st camera, make changes for 2nd (3rd, 4th, 5th) camera and send the same file to Rebus Renderfarm even if rendering of a picture from 1st camera is not over yet?