Ranchcomputing.com rocks! Tried it out and is really great.

[thednx]

Hi,

just wanted to let You guys and gals know that Ranchcomputing.com is really cool.

The price is ok, the support is impressive to say the least. They are fast, they are competant, and they hold what they promise.

I tried out my first render, since i didnt want to test the limits of my cpu again and again, and bam! the file came back before i could get back from getting coffee. (really; it crunched the numbers of my test scene in 1,5 minutes).

Since its a hobby, i wont be rendering stuff all day every day, but once i have scene done, i will gladly spend 9 euros for a full blast render, and not have to wait in front of a computer that i can use as a heater and nothing much else during rendering.

Praise where praise deserved. Ranchcomputing is really a cool and thought-through solution.
(only critic: they could make the price estimator a bit better).

[Bosseye]

I've used them a few times for rush rush work and I'm pretty pleased. Support has been excellent - swift, friendly and efficient for anything I've needed (which isn't much) and the automated process works well. And of course the speed is astonishing - renders that I'd have to leave for 3 or 4 days on my machine are done in 4 minutes.

The only thing I would say is that it can be hard to assess the typical costs of an image. For one thing, working with their suggested caterpillar scene to get a Delta value to estimate times and costs doesn't give a particularly accurate representation I found. Its also harder to know how long merging .igi phases etc will take, so although I set a time limit of 4 minutes and/or a max spp of 4000, the actual chargeable process time goes beyond that for another 5 minutes sometimes, merging igi files meaning the final cost is higher than expected. Not catastrophically so, but it can give the impression of 'flying blind' a little bit.

But generally a very good service and worth a go if you're pushed for time.

[RenderFred]

Thanks for the kind words! I just posted some precisions in the RANCH sticky thread.

Fred