Anyone use RenderFarms?

revenger681

I put off using DS for rendering for quite some time, I usually do all my poses in DS then export to Bryce or Carrara for the actual rendering part because of simplicity and quality. Recently, I've found BlenderRenders. Of all I've seen so far they're the only ones that have the official stable release of Lux1.0, as well as the option to render via network, OR to upload it to their servers and let it run, re-download the lux files, merge and get fantastic results. I love their prices, the render below is after 1 hour (took my slow computer more than 3 days of off-and-on rendering to get almost half way there).

I was curious if anyone else uses services like this to do things, especially for competitions or the many forum challenges here. Seems they'd be a good way to meet a deadline if you're like me and cannot afford to give up your computer for hours to let a project render. So far they're the best price I've come accross. My picture cost $1.00, which I think it quite reasonable. Other sites I've found ONLY do animations and not stills or require a large deposit.

After trying this service out, and seeing how they pretty much beat any other offer out there i'm wondering if there is any others out there like them that offer this kind of deal. As well as share it here on the forums for those who might not know about them and want a look. Now... If only there were a farm out there that supported Carrara (I've only found 1 so far, and they require a lot as a minimum charge).

cridgit

Redacted

prixat

Just out of interest, how many samples per second does Lux give you on your system?

Mattymanx

prixat said:

Just out of interest, how many samples per second does Lux give you on your system?

That varies per scene. The highest I have had is 500 S/p in one hour. Everything else has been a lot less than that.

revenger681

cridgit said:

I use Amazon Web Services with a self-installed Lux slave for my Reality renders and wrote a tut about how to set this up (see link in my sig). I've also used my home PC's networked together but they're not as powerful.

If I start using it more like when I'm working on a project (if that ever happens) then I might consider buying a server. Its simply a question of how much the server costs vs. how much cloud rendering time I'd need to buy.

I saw that tutorial, i've considered using it. I might try it out sometime.

As for samples per second, I have no idea. On a current render that I've had going for 3 days so far. it reads "average number of samples per pixle by local node: 999.16" And "average number of samples per second in current time window: 40.37". Looks like there are several numbers like these. The total samples atm I have are 3.7k. I'm gonna let it go a bit higher than that to clear up.

prixat

revenger681 said:

... "average number of samples per second in current time window: 40.37"...

You really, really need a faster machine :-)

...or a faster renderer. If you're comfortable in Blender have you considered a commercial renderer like Indigo, there's a free (size restricted and logo in the corner) demo to play with.

I've been playing with it for a while. The demo is good enough for my purposes that I might never buy the actual thing :coolsmile:

Obviously this is heavily dependent on the hardware but I'm getting 800,000 samples per second on a simple scene (single genesis figure using Indigo's Sun/Sky lighting)

If I add in my distinctly average GTX550ti graphics card I get 'average numbers of samples per second: 1.2million'