Render Farm...yeehaw!!!

[BeEt]

Hello all...

what would ya recommend for starting a render farm? single or dual processor? speed? ram? corn feed versus synthetic? etc...?

thanks

[trentonia]

I would recommend that you save your money and just use http://www.respower.com

[mattclary]

Trentonia, do you have any business interest in Respower? Or are you just a customer?

[trentonia]

Just a happy, thankful, grateful, ecstatic customer with a whole lot more time on my hands. Not to mention lower blood pressure, hope and optimism, and a smile for my fellow wavers. I just want everyone to experience the JOY.

[trentonia]

P.S. My hair is growing back nicely, thank you.

[dwburman]

As I've said elsewhere, Respower is a good option and can save your butt. There are some limitations, though. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't use 3rd party plug-ins with Respower. [edit: I was wrong... you can use 3rd party plug-ins] I own a few commercial LW plugins (G2, Taft and EdgeFX) and sometimes it's nice to be able to use them. :)

I'm considering putting together a little farm of my own. I used to have one consisting of 3 dual celeron machines. I still have cases and a some parts from them so I'm thinking of fixing them up again. I'm looking at something like AMD 2500XP based systems with 512MB of RAM. I think I got the price down to around $1100 for 3 sets of Mobo, CPU, RAM and PowerSupplies. Of course, It'd help if I actually had the money right now...

I think I read somewhere that single CPU systems give you more bang for your buck. Space and power consumption may be considerations too. If you do go dual, remember to get twice the RAM since your scene will be loaded twice.

[ResPower]

Originally posted by dwburman
As I've said elsewhere, Respower is a good option and can save your butt. There are some limitations, though. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't use 3rd party plug-ins with Respower. I own a few commercial LW plugins (G2, Taft and EdgeFX) and sometimes it's nice to be able to use them. :)

Okay, I am correcting you. You can use 3rd party plugins. We own G2, Taft, Sasquatch, etc. already. For those that we don't own, we will install for our users on an as-needed basis under the following conditions:

1) You own a legal copy
2) The plug-in allows for free network rendering.

You are renting our computers so our position is we can run your plug-ins for you legally as long as the plug-in license allows for free network rendering. For the time you are rendering, the computers are actually yours.

[dwburman]

Thank you for clearing that up and I'm sorry for spreading misinformation. I thought I read that somewhere (on your site or in a review or something) and that it was more of a support issue. I'm glad to hear I was wrong :)

Now I have one less reason to put $$ into a farm instead of buying a VT3.

[Noclar7]

I can vouche for Rezpower.. saved my butt.. and is rediculouly easy to use
it is good to have a couple systems too for small jobs and or testing.. http://www.boxxtech.com rendernodes work nice.. a little pricey but above normal support.

[BeEt]

ah neato.. thanks for the replies. i ll take respower into consideration :eek:

[PHilly[Dee]]

there's some free good programs that help you manage renderfarms, like Joe Justice's "LightNet", and "SPIDER" from StationX. Once you have a renderfarm set up, these programs are really useful to help you manage your farm.

[riki]

Respower, isn't working for me.

re: http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16155

[ResPower]

Ricki -

When you keep uploading corrupted files, and won't learn how to figure out that you're uploading corrupted files through the use of our logging features, it's not our fault. You're blaming us for your not knowing how to use the gas pump at the self-service station.

You should probably switch FTP programs or else check with your IP service. As for finding out what's wrong, go to the log entries on INDIVIDUAL FRAMES as we noted in a previous support email.

We're always available, 24/7, to answer phone calls too. We also do our best to monitor emails that arrive in the middle of the night, but the best way to get a hold of us 24/7 is to call us. When you do so, you get one of the two owners of the company at their homes, myself or Early.

[pixelinfected]

all depend of your needing, if you need sometinmes of renderfarm the best solution is respower or similar, if you need everytimes, segrets custom project and more, i suggest you a renderfarm build with rack computer, dual cpu (less cost and energy consuming than single cpu) with butterfly net render which allow to controll win, mac and linux node, we use that and all work fine, we tried lightnet and spider, but i prefer butterfly.

good work

[KouunnoHito]

My thought is it depends on your buisness if it's personal then, with the prices of computer parts it would be advantageous to just build computers so many at a time and assembly your own Small renderfarm. A buisness could go either way and ultimately it's cheaper for them to use services like respower. Depending on the nature of the buisness of course.

[Draven]

ResPower has 250 2 Ghz Pentium 4s... you just can't beat that for rendering a project. I have a few render nodes here, but even all of them together literally match up to two of ResPower's nodes... Respower will render in one hour what would take me just over five days... and that would be 5 days with every machine in the house rendering. Services like this enable you to be able to take on projects you couldn't dream of if you were rendering it at home, with alot less consideration for render time.

Put another way, you can add $125 to your client's bill, and have something it would take you three or four days to render in an hour.

Just don't tell your client :)

[KouunnoHito]

Like I said beore it all depends on your needs

[earlye]

Originally posted by KouunnoHito
My thought is it depends on your buisness if it's personal then, with the prices of computer parts it would be advantageous to just build computers so many at a time and assembly your own Small renderfarm.

I would suggest that especially for personal use, a self-service render farm (http://www.respower.com/) makes more sense than building-your-own.

Consider that for the cost of one very low end computer, you can get roughly 83 GHz *Days* of rendering. And that much rendering will finish at ResPower in about 4 hours, so your personal animation would have been finished before that Dell box even left the factory :)

Consider that you need somewhere to store your computers, so the cost of equipment is really just the beginning. Add in electricity, insurance, the headaches of keeping it all working, upgrades, surge protectors, UPS's, etc., and you'll see that it's a lot more expensive than just buying a hard drive, motherboard, ram, cpu, and case.

In fact, I would say that you'd be better served to spend your money on a better video card so you can design your models & animations faster, a faster Internet connection that you can use for upload/download from a render farm in addition to surfing the web a lot faster, and better cpu & ram so your test renders spit out faster. All of that will let you design faster.

One final point - if you were to go into conventional film production, would you build your own film lab? Are you more likely to do so if you're making the film for personal enjoyment?

Of course, if you don't care about waiting a month or two for your small farm to finish something that ResPower would knock out in a few minutes or hours; or you've got no money and a bunch of spare parts you could throw together to make a tiny farm; then it might make sense to build your own. But even then I doubt it.

[Draven]

Earlye said:
"One final point - if you were to go into conventional film production, would you build your own film lab? Are you more likely to do so if you're making the film for personal enjoyment?"

An even better version of the same analogy is:

If you were to go into conventional film production, would you buy your own film camera? More than likely not, you'd rent it. Would you buy your own color correction or telecine suite? no, you'd rent them. Using a commercial renderfarm is the same idea.

[digimassa]

:cool:

and if you were a photographer?^^

I own 3 Contax, 3 Nikkons, 1 Minolta, 1 Graflex and 1 Rolleicord and a board of lenses, part of my personal tools.

So why it should be bad to use some computers in a small renderfarm?

[earlye]

I think Draven was referring to the way that most, if not all, modern film studios don't buy any of their film-production equipment. They rent their cameras, lights, blah blah blah, and give 'em back to their respective owners when production wraps. It just makes more economic sense to do it that way, b/c the rental house can amortize the cost of the equipment across all of the studios instead of each studio bearing the full brunt.

I didn't say it would be bad to have your own small render farm; I said it would make more sense for you to spend your money on a better workstation.

I suppose that kind of plays into the photographer angle (although I think the analogy to film production is more applicable); you've bought some kick-*** cameras so that you can get the shots you really want. I suggest building a kick-*** workstation so that you can build the scenes you really want.

Of course, I'm not biased at all in thinking you're better off going with an outside render farm (http://www.respower.com/) ... :p

[KouunnoHito]

I think your ridiculous, simply said if your doing personal stuff a small render farm doesn't hurt at all. Average cost to build a PC these days is about cheap for a high end one, nevermind the fact that prices are always dropping. To build a net rendering box would be much cheaper and your only reoccurring cost is electricity. My monthly electric bill average is $35-40 when I leave my computers on all the time, with the high being $67. I picked up a nice quality cheap A/C wall unit I can throw in there if it gets really hot during the summer :cool: (has a remote :D)

Works well for me, If I'm doing professional stuff I'd find a professional company to have it done at.

See I'm conviced it's not needed for personal stuff because this works for me, I know it works, I'm doing it! No amount of jibberish or mocking can change my mind.

[ResPower]

Guys, I think what KouunnoHito is saying is, if you aren't going to be earning money on a project, and you don't have a deadline on the project, then you won't need an outsourced render farm (http://www.respower.com), because time is not the deciding factor for him. Sure, he'd take 250 times longer to do something, but remember, people still are using Pentium I machines. Nothing wrong with that on a personal project or hobby.

[KouunnoHito]

To all the res power people;

How long and how much would it cost to render a 30 minute animation, with a moderate amount of geomtry and VFX ?

[digimassa]

:cool:
What I wonder is, how to get the rendered images back from ResPower to my computer; one image in video-resolution has a size of about 1,3 MB (in PAL), so 10 minutes are 15.000x1,3 , gives nearly 20GB.

[digimassa]

:cool:
did some calculations:
-it takes me about 67hrs to download 20 GB,
-if I use a personal renderfarm with 10 compis, I have 670 hrs to render my 15.000 frames,
-so critical rendertime per frame is 2,68 minutes^^

other calculations: didn´t calculate exactly, hope to know without that.
One good pro-level videocamera included lense and viewfinder and mic and so on and according recorder with adapter^^ and so on coasts you maybe more then 250PIV 2GHz, so this items were to compare, not a home-grown small renderefarm with a HDTV-Equipment^^

KouunnoHito, go to respower.com, this is a real cool organised system, e.g. you can calculate the prices exactly, the rendertime.. and the prices are amazing good, I got a price of 78$ for a 125 hrs rendering with one PIV3GHz, its worth a look.

I wanna write some words to content of this thread, trying to show users of personal renderfarms as "non" pros ( no money, no deadline^^); as I showed above, its a matter of "rendertime per frame" to buy rendertime.

Another point: "Buy a better workstation instead of nodes"; maybe I use a PC with heavy wildcard, newest chipset-, CPU- and RAM-technologie, maybe this is a "workstation". How to improve it? Spending 3000$ for vga instead of 2000$?

Or buy 2 nodes?

I love the sound of busy nodes^^this "peep, peep, peep", as the "click, click, click" of prerolling tape recorders.

[Noclar7]

I'd just like to say jump in here for a sec to make a point.

We have a small RenderBoxx farm at our studio, and we have also used respower. The choice to use either really comes down to time and money. If you dont have alot of time, and a paying project is due, a service like respower is a godsend.
We ran into a situation a while back where we had to have a fully animated 30 second comercial on Beta and at the station in 2 weeks. If we would have rendered all the passes and tests at the studio, it would have taken up most of our development time, therefore respower suited us fine. On the other hand, we still shoot out frames on a as needed basis with our farm here, (this can only be done with a decent timeline mind you.)
Point being, use both! if you have a small/large farm, single computer, whatever, a service is a service, just do the math and figure out what works best.

btw, digimassa,
Your frames get compressed into a .zip file online that you donwload, and raw files, compress really nicely :)

[riki]

I think if you had a lot of files, you could probably work something out with the guys at Res, burning to disk or something like that. They seem very helpful.

[earlye]

Originally posted by KouunnoHito
To all the res power people;

How long and how much would it cost to render a 30 minute animation, with a moderate amount of geomtry and VFX ?

Unfortunately, that's not really enough information to go on. The amount of geometry actually has less effect than the surface attributes, e.g., 2 parallel reflective surfaces with high ray recursion limits can take longer than a few hundred thousand matte polygons without raytracing. The real issue is, how long does each frame take to render?

You can expect your animation to finish roughly 250x faster than one 2GHz PC can accomplish. The cost is entirely dependent on the amount of time required to do the render, and not on the number of frames.

So the price and turnaround time can vary quite widely depending on your average frame render time:

NOTE:30 minutes NTSC video: 30min*30fps*60sec/min=54,000 frames

1 GHz*sec/frame -> 54,000 GHz*sec, or 15 GHz*Hrs. $7.50

60 GHz*sec/frame -> 900 GHz*Hr, $450 list or $405 bulk purchase

1 GHz*Hr/frame -> 54000 GHz*Hrs, or $13,500.00 bulk

And here's the "How Long" part:

ResPower:
15 GHz*Hrs -> about 2 minutes
900 GHz*Hrs -> about 2 hours
54000 GHz*Hrs -> about 108 hrs or 4.5 days

Single 2 GHz PC:
15 GHz*Hrs -> 7.5 Hours
900 GHz*Hrs -> 450 hours, or 18.75 days
54000 GHz*Hrs -> 27000 hours, or 1125 days, or roughly 3 years

So if you can keep your render times low, we're extremely affordable for personal use. Obviously, if you let your render times balloon, and delivery time is not an issue (which it won't be if you're just rendering for you), it will be cheaper to "wait it out."

BTW, I hope you didn't take anything I've posted as mocking. Clearly I differ in my opinion as to whether building your own render farm is a good way to spend your money (and I swear that's an unbiased view ;) ), but I certainly never intended to make fun of you in any way.

[KouunnoHito]

wELL, thanks for the info now if I ever need to go that route I know what to do. In the mean time I'll just go cruising along on my small renderfarm.

[ResPower]

Originally posted by digimassa
: What I wonder is, how to get the rendered images back from ResPower to my computer; one image in video-resolution has a size of about 1,3 MB (in PAL), so 10 minutes are 15.000x1,3 , gives nearly 20GB.

We allow the option of zipping up or rar'ing your files into smaller chunks through our render farm (http://www.respower.com) interface. We also will fed-ex your files on CD or DVD. We've seen 20 GB of rendered files squeeze down to 1 or 2 GB without much difficulty if using the RAR option

[KouunnoHito]

Originally posted by BeEt
Hello all...

what would ya recommend for starting a render farm? single or dual processor? speed? ram? corn feed versus synthetic? etc...?

thanks The new macs are nice If your going PC then get a 64 bit chip and dual soley depends on the application and OS.

[Draven]

The new macs are overpriced for render farm use. Consider i could build about five PCs of the same speed (render-wise) for what the cheapest slowest single processor G5 costs....

[KouunnoHito]

sure but atm they are the fastest, if your building a comparable system however I doubt you would get 5 systems out of it.

Price me a comparable dual athlon 64 PC and get 5 of them for the price of a g5 dual 2 ghz. I think that's fair enough. If you do manage to do it that's 600 bucks per pc system I'd gladly buy one from you:o

[Draven]

not for Lightwave rendering... or any other task besides the benchmarks apple uses to promote them.

[KouunnoHito]

So you have one ? How you like it ?

[Draven]

my school has three of them, with another ten on order. IMHO they are overpriced and underpowered for what you get.

[KouunnoHito]

In comparision to what I have tried them I think they are great. Everyone I have talk to that uses them enjoy them what about it don't you like ?


Edit: Well I waited a while for a reply, guess I'm going to bed now it's really late maybe PM me if you want to talk further. I just realized I newer answered the original posters question. Anyway just pm me if you want to finish

[Scott Gammans]

I can see how Early's company can be a godsend if you've got a massive paying project and you're in a hurry, but even the bulk rate of $0.25 per GHz/hour seems awfully steep.

Given the numbers above, for $13,500 I can build sixteen 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 render machines and finish the example 30-minute animation in less than two months. Sure, that's not as fast as Early's render farm can do it, but on the other hand I'll still have my sixteen computers available for my next project.

[ResPower]

Originally posted by Scott Gammans
Given the numbers above, for $13,500 I can build sixteen 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 render machines and finish the example 30-minute animation in less than two months. Sure, that's not as fast as Early's render farm can do it, but on the other hand I'll still have my sixteen computers available for my next project. [/B]

Only if you're time rich and cash poor. Remember, it's not the big who eat the small; it's the fast who eat the slow. While you're waiting for your animation to get finished in two months, your competitors are getting similar work done in days, even hours.

You'd also have to set up the software for those machines, maintain them, build infrastructure - a server, a network, etc. And figure out how to air condition them. And figure out why your renders aren't working. Etc. It's not actually an easy task, I know, Early and I spent a lot of long hours doing all of that. And I'm not entirely certain that your numbers are accurate on sixteen of them - if you include the fact that at that stage, you'll have to have a server capable of handling 16 3 GHz computers smacking it around for files. Probably would need GIG-E networking, not some crummy hub you can buy down at CompUSA.

You'd have them after your project, sure. Growing old and obsolete with every passing moment. Breaking down every now and then. Annoying you and wearing you down.

In my humble opinion, you'd do better to spend your time animating and modeling rather than setting up everything necessary for a render farm (http://www.respower.com) unless you are time rich and cash poor. Of course I'm biased, but I did spend several years as an animator having to work for cheap companies that wouldn't get me a render farm (at the time there wasn't a company like ResPower for us to outsource to, obviously).

I was forced to use secretarial machines or workstations at night. Walking around the empty building, turning on computers, starting up the screamers, going back to my workstation, starting up the network screamer panel in Lightwave... I'd blow an hour or two every night getting thirty machines running. I should've been modeling and animating.

Bah!

Never again!!!

[earlye]

Originally posted by Scott Gammans
I can see how Early's company can be a godsend if you've got a massive paying project and you're in a hurry, but even the bulk rate of $0.25 per GHz/hour seems awfully steep.

Given the numbers above, for $13,500 I can build sixteen 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 render machines and finish the example 30-minute animation in less than two months. Sure, that's not as fast as Early's render farm can do it, but on the other hand I'll still have my sixteen computers available for my next project.

When you consider that our least expensive competitor was charging in the neighborhood of $10.00 / GHz*Hr when we first started this business (a scant 4 years ago), it becomes very clear that we're working hard to drive costs down. Of course it's only really possible to drive them down further (which we want to do, btw) as our volume increases - hint hint :)

With regards to a $13.5k render farm (clearly we're out of the realm of personal use again) don't forget to include the ancilliary costs. I don't just mean the networking, electricity, air conditioning, taxes, or the really obnoxious amount of time it'll take to set up (although none of these are insignificant)...

What I'm really talking about now is the opportunity cost. Suppose you and a competitor both land jobs of the scale that we're talking about. You both finish your design work in roughly the same amount of time. You both kick off your render at roughly the same time, but your competitor came to us. During the 4.5 days of rendering, your competitor went out and did some sales work to land another project of the same size.

Meanwhile, you're waiting 2 months for your render to finish. You had to pass on that second project of the same size, because you don't have the capacity to get the render done. Any work you do get is going to have to be smaller in scope (and by virtue of that, money).