Render Farm Interest

[OnoSendai]

Hi everyone,
I need to gauge the level of interest of people for using Indigo on a commercial render farm.
The price would be US$0.40 per GHz-hour.
The available rendering capacity is at least 300Ghz, Core 2 Quad CPUs, 4GB Ram per node.

The rendering service itself is a high quality, fully automated system.

The creation of this service will be contingent on the level of interest shown, so if you are interested, please vote in the poll, or leave a message in this thread.

thanks.

-- Nick Chapman

[WytRaven]

It's expensive, but imagine the possibilities?? This opens the door for indigo animation or decent resolution renders let run to full convergence.

Because it is expensive I can't see your average forum user uploading a scene a week but for those like BbB that are capable of truly professional work this could well open up legitimate business opportunities for them

I would want to see some example scenes rendered to say like 10000spp on a reference desktop machine and then the same scene rendered on the farm to the same spp and a comparison of the times to help us estimate costs.

[tizxx]

Well i'm very interesting on it...

The pharm is formed of 75 quad core PC?

It's a big number...

[Kram1032]

double post due to early edit, sry...

[Kram1032]

25
you need to divide by 3, as each core has 3 GHz

[BbB]

Well, let's see. I'd say I need about 30 hours for a super clean render on my quad assuming a relatively complicated scene. This would be equivalent to 120 hours on one core. Or 292.2 hours for each Ghz. Which would work at about $120.

Given that the most buck I've ever made on an image was something like $25 (and that was multiple sales over 6 months) no, I think I'll pass on the offer, unless some one tells me how to make that kind of money as a CG hobbyist...

[WytRaven]

if $25 for multiple sales in total is all you got then you are pricing yourself incorrectly

[BbB]

I'm talking of microstock. We sell for $1 a pop. Most images don't sell at all even at this price. $25 is a stellar seller (and now that I think of it, it wasn't even CG but a photo )

[Zom-B]

Hmmm... a full hour on such a 300ghz farm would cost 120$US... this is about 85€.
Comparing to other rendering Farms this isn't expensive guys!

The cheapest I know is only for C4D named renderking

If you are using Indigo for commercial Projects this rendering Service would be interesting! But mostly for animations, so you should enhance animation support for Indigo (if this somehow possible for an unbaised renderer??!).


Do you plan to simply sell the access to this farm, by allowing a server that starts from the customer so that he can manage his renderings?
Or is it a full service thing, where the customer send you the project files, and you don the stuff and upload the result to FTP?


If the first one is the way you go, I think you need to optimize your network code by 3 aspects to optimize for renderfarms:

1) compressing the result before sending to client using (7)zip (saves Bandwidth)

2) A "waiting line" system so that a server always only requests one results then the next.

3) On the fly change for stuff like "halt_time" & "halt_samples_per_pixel", from the server.

[Zom-B]

I think I'll pass on the offer, unless some one tells me how to make that kind of money as a CG hobbyist...

Doing Animations instead of stills.

I'm an Freelancing Web designer who "specialized" to include videos in website design.
videos are mostly 3D animations, it don't has to be stat of the art animation work.
mostly stuff to enhance the website, like roll over animations etc.
I take 35-45€ for 1hour of work + tax!

Try to offer your service for Architects etc. who need to visualize their CAD stuff!

[BbB]

Thanks for the tip. But I think I haven't reached the point where I can give up the day job... Sadly. Plus I've got this feeling that CG would stop being fun the minute you're dealing with clients. Sorry but I'm a genuine useless amateur...

[Kosmokrator]

[off topic]
hehehe BbB.......

I've got this feeling that CG would stop being fun the minute you're dealing with clients. Sorry but I'm a genuine useless amateur...

u rock man........with absolutely right.......im a 3d hobbyst too.....i have make some commercial things too for architects time to time.....and i know.....fun stops......

3d for me its for fun and what the hell...sometimes for extra money.....

[WytRaven]

BbB you are about as much an amateur as Einstein was a hack!

[BbB]

Compliment appreciated, but no... anytime I spend five minutes on the CGTalk gallery forum I feel like throwing myself out the window.

[zsouthboy]

Compliment appreciated, but no... anytime I spend five minutes on the CGTalk gallery forum I feel like throwing myself out the window.

Man, I hear that!

It's like computing as a hobby - tons of fun!

Then friends and family pester you for every single little problem (that they don't bother googling solutions for themselves first ) - _not_ fun!

@Ono: I'd love to one day be using Indigo enough to need such a service.

I don't see that happening myself.

BUT the possibility of having something come up, and being needed sooner than ASAP - such that the render service would be worth it - that's a good idea.

You made Indigo too damn fast for most things! Most of us don't need a service like that.