Render Farm Review.
So I don't often post about the work I do at my day job. Quite frankly because my day job and Blender don't overlap much but in the last few weeks I've been assigned 4 commercial projects that are all 3D/Blender exclusive. Which has been a very welcome event in my professional life. However, as I quickly realized all these projects required an enormous amount of rendering that I realized couldn't be done in-house. So I went on a journey to find a Render Farm to use. There are a good number of options out there for Blender Render Farms. Below are the ones I picked and tested and my thoughts on them.
But first a little info about the project I set out to render. I was working on a 30 sec animation but I only had to render out 300 frames of the animation on a render farm. I was using Tadine's Ice Cube model Basically the 500 frames of animation consisted of an ice cube levitating and shattering revealing a logo within it. Pretty basic stuff, but this scene rendered out with 500 samples in Cycles to 9.5 minutes per frame to render. So for a 500 frame animation I was looking at around 80hrs to render this on my 2x2.4 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon MacPro without a GPL render card. Ouch... So lets see how the farms did.
RenderFlow offers probably the best price for a renderfarm out of the ones I researched. They have a plugin that is pretty easy to install, however getting it to work is another matter. Once I had an account and the plugin installed I went to render my project and started running into issues. With a quick email and post on twitter I had a reply in a couple of hours which isn't bad but it's no Render Street. They also offer you $25 to test there service.
So Render Street is differant from all these other site because it does not require you to install a plugin or additional software, which I found really refreshing. However, I can also see the downfalls to this. They also have a great pricing calculator you choose your render engine download a benchmark file and render it on your computer then input the time it took and the number of frames you have to render and they give you estimated pricing for your project. Like most of the render farm services you get $25 to test out there service.
Your required to pack and zip your blend and then upload it to your account. Easy enough, fill out some data about the file like render engine used, frames to render, etc and then submit the project. Once submitted you can view the progress of everyframe in your render via your account. Once a frame is rendered you can download that frame to make sure it looks right. So after screwing a few things up I set out to render the full animation. While nerviously watching the auto estimator update after every frame rendered. When it was all said and don't my 500 frame animation that would of taken me 80hrs to render took about 2hours and cost me just under $200.
I had high hopes for Renderfarm.fi because I've used them before and in the past there was even talks of implementing some cross site information with Blend Swap. RenderFarm.fi also has it's own plugin that is easily installed. Just fill in your data in the renderffarm.fi plug in area and choose render on renderfarm.fi... Unfortunitly, that's as far as I got considering the render is still sitting on the site pending rendering. Not sure what happened to the guys over there, hopefully I just happened to want to use them at a time when they where offline. But this option at least at this point is unusable.
Published August 13, 2013 by mofx
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Written November 20, 2022(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)/'+(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)+'"+(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)+"/
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