Cloud Rendering

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

We're currently investigating the feasibility, both technical and financial, of providing a button on the UI which causes a rendering to happen "on the cloud".  

We're pretty confident we can do about 320 core-hours of rendering overnight (10 hrs.?) for about $100.00.  That would be the equivalent of an 8-core machine working for 40 hours.  For example, four 10-hour renderings (80 cpu-hours each) would cost $25 each.  One 40-hour rendering would cost $100.

Large animations would be more and probably, at least at first, negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

 

Let me know what you think....

 

 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'm sure sending small jobs will be possible.  What we're really talking about, though, is a "supercomputer" button.  It's really designed for the larger jobs where rendering locally isn't as practical.  Yes, some sort of cost estimating will be a necessary component of this.  I'll know a little more next week, but this outfit has a concept where if you want to pay more you can have a job faster (by allocating more resources to it.)

The $100 price point we're looking at would be the equivalent of setting my 12-core machine loose for 27 hours.  A quad core would take half a week to do the same work.  For $100 we're talking 10 hours or so.  Perhaps, for $200 the same job could take 2.5 hours (just guessing here-- about all of it really.)

What I'm trying to evaluate is what the interest level is in this.  Folks are always asking how to make their path tracings go faster.  Here's a potential solution-- pay $100 and get a 32-core system for 10 hrs.  Pay $200 and get a 128-core system for 2.5 hours....

 

It has many problems but it strikes me as pretty interesting.  For small businesses it could be an easy and flexible way to expand capabilities without investing in extra hardware.  For large businesses it's a way to get more power without involving the IT department.

[OYEBANJI EMMANUEL]

I am interested in you adding a render farm service but please bring the price down by 70% especially for those of us who need to render walkthrough animations. Thank you Sir.