Build a renderfarm of pay by the hour?

[Mauritius]

Maybe, if you could be a bit more specific what package you use.

I always suggest Linux+Grid Engine+RMan renderer (Pixie, 3Delight). All three are free.
If you use Maya or Lightwave, there are free plug-ins to get your scene into a RMan renderer.

.mm

[Lunatique]

We're looking at either Maya with PRman, and if that is too problematic, then XSI and Mental Ray.

We're leaning towards Maya with PRman, as Prman is much faster for complex scenes.

[Mauritius]

Well, PRMan is $5k per CPU. 3Delight is free and this renderer is used in professional production by [paying] customers. However, MTOR is worth a look, as it is much more aritst friendly, currently, than Weta's free Liquid Plug-In. So if you can afford $3.5k for an MTOR seat, but not $50k for 10 PRMan licenses, than 3Delight + MTOR may be a good option.
The 3Delight developers also offer a kind of 'support ' contract for commercial scale projects. They even implement special features in their renderer, you may need, if you pay them ...

.mm

[beaker]

Just food for thought. If your using any renderman renderer your going to have to transport 100-1gig PER FRAME rib files to the renderfarm, plus any textures files, readarchives, etc.... It's going to be alot of work and alot of file space to do unless they are local place.

It is going to be very hard to find a 3rd party to render the scenes. Even a university is going to have only a finate amount of licenses(10-20 unless your using one of the free renderman renderers). Most commercial 3rd party places aren't going to render prman or any other renderman package because the demand for that sort of thing is very small and not profitable.

>>(a side question-- I've heard that upsampling 1280 to 35mm actually costs a lot more than just 2k to 35mm. Is that true? How much more expensive?)

It is if your having them do the upsample. They will usually run it through a quantel or cineon for the upresing which costs like $500+ an hour. Depending on the detail of your scenes you could get away at a just outputting at a 1k rez rather than a 2k or uprezing it yourself. What I would do is make some sample frames output to film. Try tests of a few images with 3-5 different versions.
1k to film
2k to film
1k uprez to 2k to film with different software packages doing the uprez.

Jimmy Neutron was rendered at 914 x 666 but it was pretty low detail(I think I mentioned this before many months ago).

[Mauritius]

Just food for thought. If your using any renderman renderer your going to have to transport 100-1gig PER FRAME rib files to the renderfarm, plus any textures files, readarchives, etc.... It's going to be alot of work and alot of file space to do unless they are local place.


So what? Why is this specific to RMan renderers? Any renderer running on some remote machine, may it be RMan compliant or not, will need to get access to scene and texture data.
RIB is one of the most compact formats to transfer that data. Unlikely will your RIB file be bigger than that of the generating Maya binary scene. So this is st. you'll always have to consider -- not only if using a RMan compliant renderer.
Mental Ray uses a RIB-like scene description too, Maya uses the scene format itself etc. ...

It is going to be very hard to find a 3rd party to render the scenes. Even a university is going to have only a finate amount of licenses(10-20 unless your using one of the free renderman renderers).
Despite most people's belief, Pixar gives Universities as many licenses as they need -- for free.

Most commercial 3rd party places aren't going to render prman or any other renderman package because the demand for that sort of thing is very small and not profitable.

Err, no. This is another myth. In fact, it is highly profitable. But many people believe you need a TD to use a RMan renderer and they never ever looked at the gains (its not speed alone, but also stability, robustness and hundreds -- not dozens -- of other things).

Since 3Delight, Aqsis and Pixie are free, you can build a renderfarm with all your machines and run as many seats of these renderers as you want w/o wasting a thought about license costs.

Resolution -- in this case -- is a question of storage space, not rendertime -- at least if you compare the rendertimes of PRMan/3Delight with those of Maya's internal renderer or MRay.

Cheers,

.mm

[beaker]

>>So what? Why is this specific to RMan renderers? Any renderer running on some remote machine, may it be RMan compliant or not, will need to get access to scene and texture data.

If he is having to remotely render rib files I just thought that he should know that he is going to have to deal with a huge amount of data to get it rendered. I have seen many people who are just used to using maya, lw, 3dsmax, etc... get freaked out when they see the 100-1gig per frame rib files that are generated. He is in china and if he needs to get this rendered in another country then transfering hundreds of gigabytes of data could be a giant roadblock to getting it done. The data for a maya file being rendered will be 1/10th to 1/100th the data depending on the scenes.

Yes you can cut this down by using alot of readarchives and many other methods. Just a FYI post.

>>Despite most people's belief, Pixar gives Universities as many licenses as they need -- for free.

I didn't know that. They have an educational pricing page on their site here:
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/pricelists/educational.html
I worked at a college back 5 years ago and inquired to them about getting prman for the school and they refered me to the prices on that site. Is this a new thing where they give prman away to schools?

>>Err, no. This is another myth. In fact, it is highly profitable.

Missunderstanding here, I should have clarified. I was responding to his post here:
"My next option is to pay for an online rendering solution like ResPower or similar."
Just saying that none of the commercial renderfarm solutions render with any renderman renderers because it's not profitable.

[Mauritius]

If he is having to remotely render rib files I just thought that he should know that he is going to have to deal with a huge amount of data to get it rendered. I have seen many people who are just used to using maya, lw, 3dsmax, etc... get freaked out when they see the 100-1gig per frame rib files that are generated.

Well, many people don't know about gzipped binary RIB or remote RIB generation ...
I also wonder where you got this 1GB RIB stuff from. I won't say it's far fetched at all, but GB size RIBs are common in high end feature film production ... Often, RIBs are written out as ascii there, so tools in the pipeline can easier do special stuff with them. A 1GB ascii RIB compresses to a 150-200MB binary, gzipped RIB.
I dunno anything about this project, but if they have scenes of this complexity, they' will face problems with file sizes, no matter what.

He is in china and if he needs to get this rendered in another country then transfering hundreds of gigabytes of data could be a giant roadblock to getting it done. The data for a maya file being rendered will be 1/10th to 1/100th the data depending on the scenes.

This is simply wrong.
If you have a Maya binary scene that is 10 mb, containing a character animation of 100 frames, this will likely generate 1GB of RIB data.
So what one would do is to transfer the Maya scene and generate the RIBs on the target machine ...

And speaking of actual productions, an equally "big" problem in terms of file size are textures. I don't understand how this doesn't apply to any other renderer as well. If you have a scene with 100 GB textures, those have to be transfered, no matter what package/renderer.

RIB files aren't any bigger than any other renderer's scene files.
If you have a maya binary file that is 1GB in size, 800MB of which is likely to be static geometry that needs to be written out once only anyway, the resulting binary gzipped RIB is likely to be less than 1 GB.
In this case [of 800MB static geometry], the RIB per frame size would be about 200 MB then (still large, if you look at the scene complexity of the average animated short film).

Anyway, you need to have [b]a lot goin' on to generate 200MB of gzipped binary character animation geometry data [that will expand to about 1GB of plain ascii RIB when being read by the renderer] ...

Cheers.

.mm

[Lunatique]

Thanks for the input guys. Very helpful.

The most complex scenes will involved as many as 10+ characters on screen--all with animations, and complex geometry for background, displacement mapping, complex lighting..etc. This short film isn't really "dumbed down" visually simply because it's a short film. It's more like feature quality visuals with short running time...

So far, the option of building a mini-renderfarm of a handful of dual processor machines seems the most likely solution--since I could have 100% control over it, easier data transportation, and can re-render shots if changes were to be made.

My team and I are still in the middle of debating this question. Any further input will be greatly apprecated.

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