Whether to render online or via desktop

#1

Hi,
So likely very much a newb consideration, but I was wondering what kinds of things I should be examining when choosing to render online using via cloud services or at home…
I guess maybe you use them each for different kinds of projects…?

Would love some input on which one is the better option in the long run. Mostly I’m in the market for a new comp and am wondering if I should get a comp for crunching data or a surface pro to also have the digital painting option…

Thanks a lot for any help!

  • Niall
#2

Depending on the projects and budgets you can choose between two.
From what I;ve seen most of the times online rendering is a bit expensive and it is there mostly to help out in crunch time, when completing the project and not breaking deadline is more important then some extra $$$ that you have to chime in.

On the other hand I have something called GPUOven in case of GPU rendering that can maybe help out :

www.gpuoven.com

A bit shameless plug but it is to help out guys around so…

#3

Hardly a shameless plug when what you’re offering is free rendering assistance… :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your info. It makes sense to me that render farm type operations are more of a failsafe or redundancy etc.

Really appreciate it!

-Niall

#4

Think of cloud rendering like renting a car. It’s incredibly expensive compared to owning a car when used for extended periods of time but in the right situations it’s worth every penny, like for a few days at a time once or twice a year. Depending on the provider you could outright buy the same hardware and software after one to three months of continuous use.

#5

online farms make it easier to bill a client for render costs, but things like render mistakes or glitches can become much more expensive if you don’t do more render tests.

Having your own farm also means you have cheap access to render tests or shader/lighting development tests

That said, there’s something to be said for the IT time investment and maintenance your own farm will require. As it scales up, you gotta start getting into more and more industrial-grade tools and workflows to manage more systems, update software, set up drive mounts/shares, etc

#6

I just wanna say that being new to game development this option of a GPU oven you’re giving to people is really helpful and much appreciated.
Thanks