August 31, 2022 Maddie Quach

Factors to consider before choosing a render service

As a creative in the 3D graphics industry, you’ve probably come across the concept of render farm at least once in a while or even sat down to research which services currently on the market are right for your project. But the story of finding service is never easy in a matrix of countless render farms, it is difficult and takes time (even money) to make the right decision.

If you’re new to the concept of render farms, then we recommend taking a look at this guide by NoTriangle Studio, which explains in detail how render farms work, who should use them and what the benefits of them are.

In today’s article, let’s go straight to the factors to consider before choosing a render farm for your project.

Before starting, if you want to have more information about key differences between cloud render service on the market, you can also have a look at this article – The next generation of render farm technology.

Your Project Pipeline

The first factor to consider when finding the right and choosing a render farm is your project pipeline. There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered to find a service that will help you shorten render times – one of the most time-consuming stages in 3D production. We can have a look at these popular questions:

  • Is your project workflow is highly customized? – We can take an example of rendering scripts, recently rendering scripts are applied in many software, including Blender, a popular open source software.
  • Is your 3d software or render engines rarely used or obsolete? Or does the render farm support your software/ software version?
  • Do you need to be able to perform edits to the project as you’re rendering?
  • Would you rather troubleshoot issues with your scene yourself?
  • Do you want to see the progress of rendering in real-time (statistics, frame buffer)?

Cost estimation

Factors to consider before choosing a render farm service 1

Finance is an extremely important factor for every project. So we always want to find a service that can optimize costs when choosing a render farm. It’s great to know that most render farms have their own tool to help you estimate render times and estimated costs for your project. However, you should take into account factors like a project’s loading time, problematic frames that need to be re-rendered, or the time it takes to calculate a GI cache, among other things. Because of this, render farms frequently include a disclaimer next to their calculators that says the final cost may be somewhat higher or lower.

Therefore, cost calculators are good tools for getting a very rough estimate of the cost of rendering, but they should be treated as an initial benchmark for the render farm cost for your project.

It can be said that the time it takes from the moment you finish uploading your project to the farm to the time when the last frame is completed depends on the following factors:

  • Total rendering time – depends on the volume of your project and rendering time per frame on each node
  • Wait time – depending on the plan and priority you selected, the nodes that are available, and your position in relation to other users that launched jobs before you and used the same plan and priority as you or higher.
  • The number of nodes assigned to your job – determined by the priority/plan you chose and the availability of nodes – a current farm load dictates how many nodes are available for use at any given time.
  • Technical issues – This problem can come from the service provider when the software they provide has problems, or it can also come from you with settings errors or problems with missing textures, …
  • Hidden cost – Storage and data transfers also should be considered with some service providers.

Learn More : Look deeper into pricing of render farms

Support policy regarding unexpected issues

After learning as well as trying out many render farms for my projects, one of the things I recommend you pay attention to is the support policy of many render farms like this when something goes wrong during the rendering process. . Although undesirable, sometimes we still have to admit that many things can go wrong when rendering over a network:

  • Incorrect settings or resolution that were predetermined by the customers
  • Underestimating the render time
  • Not monitoring the render job
  • Missing textures
  • Wrong frames, camera or layers selected

Yeah! No service is perfect. And in cases like these, even knowing the fault isn’t entirely on the service side, you’ll still feel extreme stress when the project’s budget is wasted without any results.

Hence, do remember to check your files before sending it across for the final render. Because many service providers also do not offer refunds for errors such as and not limited to the undermentioned.

Your resourse

Resources here are not simply about finances, but what is important is the resources to be able to operate everything during the rendering process.

While using traditional render farms (SaaS), even just one person who is able to upload the data properly can help the project almost be completed smoothly.  While with IaaS, it is necessary to have human resources to set up the working environment, manage the rendering job and everything related to your workload. Moreover, for beginners, some services like AWS take a long time to understand and get used to their workflow.

If you are a professional 3D artist or you have an advanced technical team from your studio to create and manage the pipeline, everything is extremely simple with any kind of render farm. 

Besides, in a 3D project, you do not always have enough licenses for the software to bring your entire working environment to one cloud system. Not to mention the fact that many software limit the number of MAC addresses per license which sometimes causes certain annoyance.

Final words

We hope that this article will help you when choosing a render farm for your projects!

iRender is proud to be a professional GPU Accelerated Cloud Rendering Service provider for 3D Render, CGI, and VFX tasks with more than 30,000 clients. We have been appreciated in many global rankings (e.g. CGDirector,  Lumion Official,  Radarrender,  InspirationTuts CAD All3DPBlenderBaseCampVFX Rendering.)

We provide high-configuration servers that are specifically configured and optimized for GPU rendering. Using our service, you have complete control and flexibility over the server you operate. Thus, you can customize your creative workstation as far as you wish. With a wide range of GPU servers from a single RTX 3090 to multiple 2/4/6/8x RTX 3090, you can choose one that meets your need to start the rendering process. Furthermore, we allow you to upgrade or downgrade your workstation without having to reinstall anything. You can even run multiple servers simultaneously to speed up the renders, not having to re-install anything, either.

Register an account today for FREE TESTING COUPON to experience our service. Or contact us via WhatsApp: (+84) 912 785 500 for advice and support.

 

Happy rendering!

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Maddie Quach

Hi everyone. Being an Customer Support from iRender, I always hope to share new things with 3D artists, data scientists from all over the world and learn from them as well.
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