Best Online Rendering Solution?

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

I’ve been looking around at potential online solutions for projects with quick turnaround times. A few support Cycles but I have a few concerns:

1.) Are they up to date? I usually use the latest builds and when little things get added (like motion blur woo-hoo!), I want to be able to take advantage rather than using whatever old version the renderfarm supports. I understand there are limits to this but I don’t want to use a way out dated version just for fast rendertimes.

2.) Are particle/physics effects buggy? I’ve seen a few that explicitly state that they don’t support particles or physics and some others that seem to (but sounds like there could be issues).

3.) Are costs really that low? I’m tempted to just buy another base computer or two and throw in a couple GTX 580s and be done with it.

As always your help is much appreciated!

As a side note, does anyone know a technique to use the netrender functions with cycles and GPU on multiple machines?

#2

I know this guy who uses multiple machines. He works at an animation studio and he is a member of this forum. I ask him all kinds of questions. He doesn’t usually join the fun in this forum.

As far as my own research on online renderers, I think it is just cheaper to invest in one or more GTX580’s and an i7-8 core with 16 gb of ram then to waste your time on online rendering services.

If you can afford to build a master computer connected to one or more slaves, then kudos to you.

You can even manage them remotely with the appropriate configurations.

#3

Thanks for the insight, and I couldn’t agree more. I have been asked to research a good online rendering solution ‘to test’ and see what it’s like. All of them I have found so far won’t work - and maybe that’s the point. In any case, if anyone has a web based rendering solution please let me know!

In terms of what you suggested, I have successfully setup a master and slave netrender with two computers with your specs exactly. However, I am not able to utilize the GPUs since there’s no option (that I’m aware of) to toggle from CPU to GPU with using netrender with Cycles. Do you know anything about configuring for GPU?

Thanks!

#4

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Lighting and Rendering”

#5

The only good “online Rendering” solution I know is render.st, it’s a very good renderfarm for Cycles.

If you mean realtime onlinerendering than I guess there is no useful solution for other applications as well.
I’ve tested one, can’t remember its name, but it was to slow in navigating the scene.

If you find a solution to create a GPU-network, please let me know :wink:

Some people use this for distributed networkrendering: Afanasy
But I’m to stupid to make it work.

Kind regards
Alain

#6

render.st is by far the best render farm for Cycles. Always up to date, fast, and very easy to use.

#7

I’m not sure what realtime online rendering would be… sounds cool but not what I’m looking for in this instance. I’m just looking for a renderfarm basically to test and see if we should go that route or just buy a few base machines with nice GPUs and render that way.

Thanks for your information in any case. GPU net rendering seems to be a tough problem to solve, not sure why. I checked out Afanasy in the past, but found it rather confusing. :slight_smile:

#8

Checking them out now, awaiting possible confirmation for the beta program. Thanks for the suggestion!

#9

Wow, this is a really nice site and it couldn’t be easier to use with blender/cycles. Phew, glad I found an easy solution. Now we just have to compare the numbers to see if the costs determine which way we go. In any case, I will use Render.st in the future for sure, just wanted to give them a little praise here and thanks m9105826 for the great suggestion!

#10

I checked out render.st. Looks good to me. Never heard of it till now.