After spending way too many hours baking 4K textures over the last day or so, still waiting for one to finish as I write, I thought I’d look into online baking. The same as I use a render farm for rendering, which I find are so quick and cost effective, I use Concierge render, but I can’t find one.
Instead I remembered Grant Abbitt’s remote computing where he did a review on Vagon https://vagon.io
It’s a bit out of date now but I like the idea, for mainly baking, at least to start with.
I’m struggling to find any recent reviews on remote computing so I thought I’d ask if anyone is using Vagon or other and what you experience as per cost and performance.
Well, renderfarm takes advantage of several computers for rendering, so there is truly something nearly impossible to do for an individual, and as a result a complex shot that can take hours at home can be rendered in a few minutes.
Here, it’s just like renting a better computer just for baking, of course you’ll get faster result, but unless you have a very old computer it will still take a lot of time anyway…
Maybe it’s possible to optimize the bake, I never tried it, but first thing I’ll try is to use open image denoise to clean the bake.
That depends on what you are baking, but I suspect that if it’s long it’s AO or full render ?
So you render a noised version, save that image in a format like .exr, load the image in the compositor in a fresh blend file, and use the denoiser and save the file in whatever format you like.
If that works and you have a lot of file to process then it might be possible to think about a way to automate the process a bit more !
My computer is up for renewal but first I have to convince the wife that I can turn my hobby into at least a little business that will justify spending 8k on a new Mac. in the meantime…
Using a render farm is great, I can up my samples to something stupid, like 10,000, make the render look great for little money and little time.
I’m hoping online computing will be a time saver too, at not much cost, when it comes to baking. But judging the response to this thread and getting some up to date info, I’m going to have to just jump in and hope for the best.
Outch, sure 8k is a lot
I’m pretty sure you can get a decent gaming pc for ~2k€ , and a good display solution around 500€.
you can even go crazy and spend extra 500€ on additional ram and hard drive.
Install linux and that should be more than fine for average 3D work even at a professional level.
At least studios can’t afford to pay 8k for all their artists
Unless you want to do highly detailed simulations or stuff like that, blender isn’t the best for that anyway.
If you can buy the last stuff it’s great, but in one year or two it will cost you probably half the price. Ask yourself if that’s really worth it…
Un-optimized work will always be slow, no matter what …
I used paperspace for a while when I had a weaker laptop. It worked great, as long as the latency is not too high it is like you are working on your own pc but with super powers.
As I wrote above, I really only want it for baking, but for now I’ve decided to bake when I go out or not using the computer. But I’m still tempted, as having another machine that will run Blender ( https://vagon.io/users/cg-artists ) and do any heavy lifting while I get on with other things might be worth setting up to have as a backup.
