RANCH Renderfarm

[RANCH Renderfarm]

Hello everyone,

As you probably know, the fast and affordable RANCH Renderfarm has been supporting Corona for some time.

I am glad to announce that we now officially support Corona Renderer version 1.4 for 3DSMax 2011 to 2017:
- Corona still images (MultiCam and MultiBand)
- Corona animations
Soon for Cinema 4D R14 to R17.

There is a new version of RANCHecker (2.4.25) that you'll need to prepare your Corona 1.4 projects. Of course, it will work again for past versions.

Enjoy!

Rodolphe
_________________
RANCH Renderfarm
http://www.ranchcomputing.com

[Juraj]

I wonder if the "Gigahertz per Hour" is good indicator anymore given the growing difference between CPU families. Westmere based X5xx are twice slower than more common E5 v1/2/3 now found.

When I compare your Ghz/H prices to Rebus, your cheapest is more than 200perc. cheaper (1.5 vs 3.3), but when comparing to actual render time equalized to same Cinebench score, the difference was only 20perc. (8 euro vs 10 euro for 10 hour render on 1000 C15 Cinebench points).

I know these are just estimates but it gets harder to compare prices now. But honestly, don't see much difference across all the competitors, expected more price under-cutting in 2016, I guess it's too good business :- )

[mitviz]

honestly render farms are a scary business especially when it comes to animations, i used ranch once but not with corona, what was estimated at about 500 euro turned into nearly or more than 2000 in the end,but i guess its not their fault maybe to some extent, just wish there were steady prices instead of per GHZ

[johan belmans]

I have tested Ranch Renderfarm.
And the estimated time/money was not the same as the actual time/money values.
But I guess this refers to all Renderfarm services.

[RANCH Renderfarm]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your interest in our service. You will find below our answers to your inquiries/remarks.

@ Juraj_Talcik: We agree with you regarding the GHz/H and we already tried another solution in the past. Nonetheless, it seems that this way of counting is still the best. We explain in details in our main guide how we charge exactly.
I know you are a competitor user but in my opinion the best would be to test both services. As a reminder we offer a 30 € free trial credit for new users and after all we are still cheaper that the competitor you mentioned.

@ mitviz: The price indicated in the cost estimator is accurate as long as the information filled in the cost estimator fields is accurate too. We have tested thousands of different jobs to make sure of its reliability beforehand.
The estimation is also based on the same % of the CPU usage both on the RANCH and on your computer. This is the case the vast majority of the time. But if somehow your scene only uses 25% of our cores instead of 100% of yours, then it will be four times as expensive (explained in the cost estimator page). It normally rarely happen but we already saw some weird specific cases. Anyway the best is to firstly render a small test of some dozen of frames.
Moreover, I have double checked: the price of the most expensive project rendered so far with your account is 135.48 € (last summer), not 2000 €! Could you confirm? Otherwise please let us know which account was used for which project ID#.

@ belly: See my reply above regarding the cost estimator information. Rodolphe e-mailed you this morning to have more details about your project. Could you tell us which exact information did you put and get in the cost estimator? It seems very unlikely that a high resolution still image of 13312 x 13312 pixels will be rendered within a 50 euros budget. Anyway we have restarted your project with our admin account. We keep you posted.

Have a nice week-end.

JP-RANCH.

[johan belmans]

Hi there

I used the following values 60 hours on a E5 2630 V2. So the estimated time was around 39 min. If I am not mistaken the render stopped after 33 min and around 3% of the render was finished.
In the meanwhile I have started the render here on our renderfarm. I will keep you updated.
Maybe one thing you can consider mentioning on your website is the fact that whenever people upload a job with only noise limit enabled. The estimated time can not be guaranteed.

have a nice weekend as well!

 

[mitviz]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your interest in our service. You will find below our answers to your inquiries/remarks.

@ Juraj_Talcik: We agree with you regarding the GHz/H and we already tried another solution in the past. Nonetheless, it seems that this way of counting is still the best. We explain in details in our main guide how we charge exactly.
I know you are a competitor user but in my opinion the best would be to test both services. As a reminder we offer a 30 € free trial credit for new users and after all we are still cheaper that the competitor you mentioned.

@ mitviz: The price indicated in the cost estimator is accurate as long as the information filled in the cost estimator fields is accurate too. We have tested thousands of different jobs to make sure of its reliability beforehand.
The estimation is also based on the same % of the CPU usage both on the RANCH and on your computer. This is the case the vast majority of the time. But if somehow your scene only uses 25% of our cores instead of 100% of yours, then it will be four times as expensive (explained in the cost estimator page). It normally rarely happen but we already saw some weird specific cases. Anyway the best is to firstly render a small test of some dozen of frames.
Moreover, I have double checked: the price of the most expensive project rendered so far with your account is 135.48 € (last summer), not 2000 €! Could you confirm? Otherwise please let us know which account was used for which project ID#.

@ belly: See my reply above regarding the cost estimator information. Rodolphe e-mailed you this morning to have more details about your project. Could you tell us which exact information did you put and get in the cost estimator? It seems very unlikely that a high resolution still image of 13312 x 13312 pixels will be rendered within a 50 euros budget. Anyway we have restarted your project with our admin account. We keep you posted.

Have a nice week-end.

JP-RANCH.

Hi, yes that was my account but we used another account to purchase the rendering credits, i won't mention the name here but we did this for payment reasons so my account calculation is not accurate and i wasn't completed in my name or mitviz and it did go to almost or above 2000 in total, and the calculator maybe accurate but in an animation things change so i cant say its your fault, the estimation gave me a good price but in the end we had to pay 4 times that to get all the rendered files or keep topping up the account so the renders can finish, i will double check the actual amount but from what i have heard all farms are similar so its up to us the users to check our scenes at intervals to get better estimation otherwise like in my case the cost will skyrocket!

[RANCH Renderfarm]

Thanks for your replies.

@ belly: We take into consideration your suggestion. We try to keep the text as essential as possible without specific cases but I will check with my teammates.
Your 13k still image project has been successfully rendered within 2h and 22min for 133 €. Around 100 servers were working on it. I put the rendered files for free inside your project ID #148718 FTP directory, in the subfolder called “Good Files” so that you can check the result. There are 9 .exr files overall (7 files are above 620 Mb!). Cheers.

@ mitviz: Alright. I understand about your client, however if you still have the project ID please provide us with it. We saw numerous rendered jobs each week and when there are some price differences this is related to a wrong estimation 95% of the time. We always invite our customers to send a first test scene beforehand to make sure it goes smoothly. Feel free to test the service again with an upcoming animation following the recommendations above, everything should go perfectly. Cheers.

JP-RANCH.

[mitviz]

Thanks for your replies.

@ belly: We take into consideration your suggestion. We try to keep the text as essential as possible without specific cases but I will check with my teammates.
Your 13k still image project has been successfully rendered within 2h and 22min for 133 €. Around 100 servers were working on it. I put the rendered files for free inside your project ID #148718 FTP directory, in the subfolder called “Good Files” so that you can check the result. There are 9 .exr files overall (7 files are above 620 Mb!). Cheers.

@ mitviz: Alright. I understand about your client, however if you still have the project ID please provide us with it. We saw numerous rendered jobs each week and when there are some price differences this is related to a wrong estimation 95% of the time. We always invite our customers to send a first test scene beforehand to make sure it goes smoothly. Feel free to test the service again with an upcoming animation following the recommendations above, everything should go perfectly. Cheers.


JP-RANCH.

Thanks, i sent this to the client, but i remember we spoke several times on the phone and i did the estimation in a correct way following all your recommendations, its just i think a normal thing when it comes to this, am not sure about anyone else but from others i know, no renderfarm has been accurate so far, always ends up being more n never less for animations, will get back to you with the project details when i get them

[3di]

Hi Ranch, are you guys able to compete with pixelow on price?  They charge $0.005 per ghz hour, and renders start immediately every time.  They've had a few reliability issues though recently, so i'm looking for a backup option.

[johan belmans]

Hi JP

thanks for continuing rendering out the whole image. This helped me to pinpoint the problem.
I have rendered the image (with the same settings) on our renderfarm. Settings: the renders stops after or limit of 300 passes or 3% noise limit.
My images was finished after 44 hours by reaching a noise limit of 3%. It took 25 passes. PC processor =  E5 2630 V2 (no distributed rendering, just a single pc).
Your image was finished after reaching a noise limit of almost 3% in 300 passes.
This due to the fact that your renderfarm divides the image into strips (height 128 pixels). So the noise limit is calculated for each strip separately and not for the whole image.
If you have a look to the 15006 GMD-intA03-13K_CInfo_RenderStamp. exr file it will be clear how many passes and reached noise limit every strip has.
You can see that not every strip has reached the same noise level. It varies between 3.8% and 3% so I am wondering if we had enabled denoising would the image be denoised in a whole or stripe by stripe?

regards

Johan

[RANCH Renderfarm]

Hi guys,

@ mitviz : Thanks for the heads-up. It might be related to these specific scenes maybe then. As I see each day animations rendered on the RANCH with the correct estimation.

@ 3di : Thanks for your interest in our service. Our prices are indicated on the website. You can use our online cost estimator beforehand to know the rendering time and price of your project(s). Maybe you feel safe that your job starts immediately with a couple of nodes only but the most important thing is when the whole project will be completed. On the RANCH, we always offer a significant computing power on each project to render them shortly for an affordable price. You can have up to 500 nodes dedicated to your animations. One server renders one frame independently.
Depending on the traffic, your project can also starts immediately with the most cost-effective priority. And it will be done likely much faster than on the competitor you mentioned. It can be useful when you are in a hurry, for tight deadline etc. Keep in mind that the turn over between projects is very fast anyway.

@ belly: Thanks for the information. In fact, we didn't integrate the new 'noise level limit' setting in RANCHecker v2.4.25. With the last version of RANCHecker (v2.4.27) it' not tolerated anymore to use this render time limit for a still image project using the MultiBand system (strips rendering) as the difficulty to render each strip can highly differ and will lead to the result you have detailed.

JP & Rodolphe – RANCH

[johan belmans]

Hi JP and Rodolphe

in the near future I might make use of your services. Possibly I will have 5 of those 13K visuals.
In the previously test render I switched off denoising because of possible RAM issues. In the meanwhile I figured out (by inhouse testing) that the previous render will need around 100 GB of Ram.
As mentioned on your website your slaves have 64GB of RAM on board.
So will this be an issue?

[RANCH Renderfarm]

Hi Belly,

Yes indeed it might be problematic as the memory would swapp on hard disk drives which can significantly increase the final render time and even stuck the rendering if the RAM consumption is too high.
We plan to have 128 GB RAM for each node in the future but we do not have any date to communicate yet.

Anyway I will check with the tech guys to see if there is something I would have missed to make the render possible. How many RAM do you have on your computers locally?

Cheers.

JP-RANCH.

[johan belmans]

HI JP,
at the moment we have 72GB. For testing purposes, we took RAM from one slave and added it to another salve so we ended up with 128 GB.