ResPower is actually pretty good

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I just wanted to let everyone know about my experience with ResPower so that they can make an informed choice about it.

I rendered about 8800 frames on it in about 2 days, which would have taken my PC about 2-4 weeks. I paid for the “gold” ($60) blender subscription and once it got started (after a couple minutes) I had between about 10-30 frames rendering simultaneously at any given time.

I have a P4 2.8 ghz with 2GB ram (pretty old CPU, not super-fast) and my rough impression was that some of their nodes are better computers than mine, and some are worse. There was one scene where I had some frames die (exceeded 1 hour per frame) and had to restart them with the specification that only nodes with more than 2GB ram should be used. They finished on the second try with that enabled.

Their FTP seems reasonable, but I can’t say much about that because my own net connection sucks.

Their customer support is pretty great, they replied quickly to two of my emails, even before I bought a subscription, and they actually had competent answers. Also they gave me an answer, then actually sent a second follow-up to clarify and correct themselves, which was helpful.

Overall the interface is OK - it’s functional but doesn’t have any amazing features. Your output comes in folders labeled with numbers only. You have to manually specify file, scene, resolution and camera per job.

I can’t really compare this to alternatives (other render farms, BURP, etc) because I haven’t used them, but I can say that my experience with ResPower was not problematic and seemed pretty worth it.

Overall, I agree that their astroturf attempt was pretty shady, but I can tell you from experience that many small companies, particularly tech companies, rely on many techniques that are more and less questionable than that, and they’re not a “worse” company for doing it, in my opinion, maybe just inept for getting caught… :wink:

One gripe: they let you RAR output, and they let you upload scenes in .ZIP files and unzip them server-side, but they don’t allow this for .RAR files, but .Blend files pack much, much better as .RARs. I only care because my upload speed is terrible here.

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I concur that ResPower is good, better still here at the office it is even the added value that makes blender a better choice than, say Max.

Astroturf attempt ?
Did I miss anything ?

3

It really has made the difference to my Blending…knowing that I can “fire and forget” and then come back a lil later to get the results is superb, but best of all, I can still Blend away while rendering…which given that my wimpy machine nearly comes to its knees when I render anything, and can’t do jack shhit, that in itself is worth its weight in gold.
How does it compare to Burp? NO COMPARISON…burp, although a very laudable aim, and a good idea, is simply NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE…when the time it allows for a job completion is measured in DAYS, then it’s pretty pointless IMHO! And it has to be said, given the cost of ResPower, I can’t see a point for Burp at all, except for those that can’t afford the what?.. $20/month…

<EDT> The Interface to RP does “need some work” however - I’d do it for free rendering for life (I’m a web dev!)…anyone from RP want to take up the offer hehe? </EDIT>

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So you’ve done a ~6 minute animation?

Can we see it ? :slight_smile:

Mike

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I’ll have it done sometime next week, but it’s not very exciting.

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Yep, gotta give Respower serious kudos. Even their most expensive Blender option is a steal! - My latest project had several thousand frames (at least) all with ray reflections and transparency that required an average of 1hour/frame to render. For $100 I had upwards of 80 frames at a time going.

Without Respower, I couldn’t make money doing Blender animations. Nuf said.

Pappy

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Yep i too love it. and in no way is their sponsorship of the Blender World Cup effecting my comments :stuck_out_tongue:

Alltaken

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one update: I had to post this- I resubmitted a job that I had to make minor fixes on, 555 frames, takes several minutes per frame to render even at 25% resolution on my machine, and I got over 150 frames rendering simultaneously! I started it about an hour ago and it’s almost done. When I first posted this I was rendering with about 21K+ frames waiting, right now there are < 6K frames waiting. So, it makes a big difference how busy it is.