Hello all!

I've been jumping around from engine to engine lately. I like to stay fluent in and play in a few different engines.

I was using 3Delight ALOT and absolutely love it. However, when it came time to render a project I found their cloud service to be a giant pain and really expensive. Upload times are terrible AND I can't seem to render more than 80 frames per session using the built in 3Delight Cloud ROP. I can use the command line but again the upload times are awful and it's pretty darn expensive.

For my current project, I've switched to Vray. I'm not a huge Vray anymore fan but I've got about a decade of experience with it. Seems good, but now at the cloud service stage it falters. Upload times are decent but I'm getting lots of errors that seem like bugs. (One example, "Multiple render elements with the same name are not supported." However I only have ONE render element. Seems to be an issue with the Chaos Cloud)

TLDR: What engine out there has the best cloud service? Just need something stable and fast!

Thanks!

Seems like Chaos Cloud is even more expensive, no? I've been on a similar search recently and after testing a ton of stuff I settled on using Microsoft Azure. Linux machines are about 40c per hour for 8 vCPUs plus fractions of a cent per GB for storage. On top of that, I found out that Houdini Indie comes with THREE additional render licenses so it's a breeze to create a scene in Solaris and render with Karma on the cloud.

I have a CentOS 8.2 VM set up with 3Delight, Arnold, Maya and Houdini Engine. Yes, there are some extra steps compared to a "normal" cloud service... figure out how to use Azure, configure VMs, install software, upload your scenes. But I love being in (almost) total control of everything. This is the next best thing to having the machines in my house. Nearly as flexible and much less expensive.

For my most recent project I have to admit Chaos Cloud did GREAT!

However, the idea of setting up my own virtual farm using Mantra/Karma is pretty darn tempting.

For my day job I developed a render farm in AWS for our Max/Vray pipeline and it works pretty well.

I do like the automated part of ChaosCloud and the speed is really hard to beat but you do pay for that premium.

How are you submitting your render jobs? Do you upload everything to Azure and manage it from there? Or is your local machine the render manager?

Looking into pricing now... appreciate the suggestion!

Chaos Cloud does seem really nice, but you definitely pay for the convenience. Great for small jobs or stills, but for animations could get pricy fast...

Right now I'm just managing stuff manually, uploading and downloading to Azure "blob" storage. I chatted with people who are using Deadline and such though, so it's possible if you have the technical know-how. Plus Azure has batch processing which can run complex scripts, but that's beyond my ability.

I tested out a Windows spot VM last night for an animation and it came back under 60 cents for 72 frames. With spot instances you save a ton, but you risk being kicked any time. They recommend it for jobs like rendering that are easy to restart. Very pleased with it!

I've been chronicling my adventures here, if you haven't read already: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/79564/ [www.sidefx.com]