Recently CG Cookie released https://blendermarket.com/products/barista and in their short video they show the bmw render costing about 1.4 cents to render over about 30 seconds. That sounds good but according to some quick calculations, it seems EC2 is more expensive than some dedicated render farms. A few people have bought it so far and I wonder if there is anybody here that happens to be one of those people that wouldn’t mind sharing some details.
I would love to know as well! My main GPU recently died on me, so I’m looking for good and cheap alternatives. I’d love to know if this is cheaper than Render Street One.
https://www.pixelplow.net/ and https://garagefarm.net/ are the cheapest I’ve been able to find based on their calculators, haven’t tried either myself. If Barista leads to cheaper renders than them I’d be (pleasantly) surprised.
its so annoying there’s no list of what kind of server is avaible …
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I think this addon is supposed to be a much more advanced version than Brenda. If that’s the case, the servers available are pretty much the whole EC2 suite of machines: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
amazon aws (like microsoft azure or google cloud) are much cheaper than any dedicated renderfarm, especially when you use the “spot” prices. The downside is that they rarely offer “out of the box” solutions, and you need to set the machines up to serve your purpose, in this case, rendering.
I found that the most complete solution for rendering comes from microsoft, with its batch explorer app. It is what comes closer to a proper render farm solution and there’s not too much work involved for the user to make it work.
AWS had brenda. It’s an ok solution, but for some proper production rendering is way too limited. If barista works as advertized, it is definitely worth checking out, as cloud solutions are usally waaaaay cheaper than render farms.
I take your point but I’d be more convinced if someone could post some data on renders they have done and how much they costed. I suppose I’ll have to try it myself sometime and run some tests.
P.S. How would an addon like this handle other addons like flip fluids? Does it run a standard version of blender under the hood or does it send the instruction from your own version of blender to the cloud? Perhaps that’s a question for the devs but you seem to have some knowledge in the area.
This appears to use AWS spot instances. This means that it is very cheap to render. I did tests a couple of years ago comparing Brenda (which is AWS spot instances as well) to commercial render farms and usually got prices of about 1/10th.
It is possible though, that render farms have become cheaper since then.
When comparing it to rendering everything at home on my GPU i get a slightly higher price with AWS than I would spend for electicity. I´m in Germany, though, where 1 kwh costs around 0.3€ so in the US rendering at home will still be alot cheaper if you only compare it to electricity and ignore wear and tear on your GPU.
This is a very interesting addon I wasn´t aware of. I would also like to know if I can run my own version of Blender and install addons/scripts myself.
Hi,
I’ve purchased it, I first had quite a few issues, unstable rendering, greyed out buttons, but the developer worked on it and it seems to work nicely now.
About prices, i’ve made benchmarks. Using “on demand” servers, it’s about same the pricing than render farms such as RenderStreet (which is one of the cheapest and solid render farm I know). On the other hand, “on spot”/request servers are 3 times cheapers than that. It’s important to know that spot server will only start up quickly if you set a price slightly higher than the maximum price displayed. The only drawback is it’s first necessary to send support messages to AWS so that they increase the servers limit. The more you use it and spend money in it, the more they will accept to raise the limit.
I haven’t tested it extensively yet, but so far it works!
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Can you tell us if you can install addons or even use an own Blender build such as Blender with Fracture modifier?
Nope, for now it only support official builds, blender 2.79b and blender 2.8, unfortunately, which means no add-ons can be installed. It would be interesting to know the developer’s plan about it.
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Ah, thank you. Too bad, in that case it is useless to me.
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Thank you for coming on the thread and enlightening us. It’s a shame about the addon situation as I’m in the same boat. Perhaps it is something for blender devs to think about in the future with cycles; making some sort of distributable instruction for it so that any render job with any configuration of addons can be sent to any machine. Sheepit also has that drawback I think. I think for most users render farms will continue to be the most used solution simply due to the ability to get unique builds set up.
FYI for all interested Barista now supports custom builds and potentially addon support therin!
I do have a question though and I’m hoping someone ITT has the answer. When I render with E-Cycles via Barista I don’t get the Compositor’s File Output node output and thats what I need. Is there any easy way to get that to output from Barista?
What does “no addons installed mean” Does this mean graswald or downloaded 3d images fromBlender Kit or objects made with the grove wont render ? I suppose once these objects are made they can be cut and pasted into a session of blender that has no addons installed maybe ?
ALSO I have noticed that when I download one item from blender kit - it can contain gigs worth of images. Like I downloaded a light from blender kit and I used one small part of that light and it made the file to large for me to upload to the blender artists forum.