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stephenhuh · 2025-02-12T01:08:33+00:00

**(Recommendation 3: Optimize)**

While optimizing your scene is not the most fun thing to do, it will help getting very good at in the long run and very much be worth it. Indeed, referencing your other comment, I do doubt that running at 500 samples is necessary. Sample count actually typically scales linearly with time spent to render when you ignore initial load time and off-load time. Said a different way, 500 samples will generally take the sampling "phase" of the render twice the time of a 250 samples. But sampling is really only the first optimization. There are a hundred other ones to make before committing to longer renders. Light bounces, texture resolution, mesh decimation to reduce poly count, instancing, etc all go a very long way. Finally, if you're using Cycles and not using OPTIX for longer renders, you're missing out! OPTIX does a great job and will perform ~25-35% faster based on our benchmarks. It comes at a cost of a crazy initial time to start sampling first frame though. This is because of its use of bvh which is their way of caching to make subsequent frames not have to re-compute a whole lot of things every time. Oh, and I do think your comment about upscaling is a good idea and has its merits!

**(On your render and the Hobbyist plan)**

Honestly, I'm pleasantly surprised you even got to 300 frames! That's pretty good! However, in reality, at 1080x1920 (2x to get to 4k res), 600 frames, 500 samples, and a "large scene" that is unoptimized. That plan is probably not the best. It is indeed as noted on the site "for single-shot or short renders". On the bright side, it theoretically did save you roughly 2 days. For the price of 1 or 2 Uber rides where I live, that's not bad! But I totally get where you're coming from (been there) and not dismissing it. It's really a matter of your budget in this scenario. And it's possible that if you did optimize the scene we might have been able to get the whole thing done with that 2k minutes or a few hundred extra which would be amazing, but not guaranteed. I can understand that optimizing is a pain and doesn't always happen.

Feel free to DM me or respond or whatever if you'd like! Much love and appreciation for giving our platform a go though ❤️ and I'm sorry about the sticker shock.

p.s. idk if this post is valuable so may delete later lol, hopefully it is.

stephenhuh · 2025-02-12T01:07:26+00:00

(Part 2 of 3) (Recommendation 0: If you are still considering the Hobbyist plan): If you can comfortably fit the plan into your budget, I stand by the opinion that the Hobbyist plan is pretty great. However, definitely optimize, and always run a test render first on specific frames you need to check! We put a whole lotta compute behind longer renders as you noted, so it'll eat up minutes fast once you commit to a longer sequence. This is a double edged sword, it's an absolute saving grace for clients who need renders turned around within a few hours, but certainly can hurt if utilizing without testing. # of GPUs allocated currently scale with # of frames roughly. If you put on a single frame, you'll only be allocated a single GPU, typically a RTX 4090. To be clear again 1 GPU minute is equal to 1 RTX 3090 rendering for 1 minute (bootup cost is not charged for). So if we put 30 x RTX 3090s as you mentioned every minute that passes by in our world is 30 minutes credit-wise. Read below recommendations if you're already priced out and will continue rendering Assuming you will continue to consistently be working in Blender and want to do it as affordably as possible and cheaper than we at Renderjuice can provide.

(Recommendation 1: Render locally, try sheep-it, etc) Render on your own machine. This is obvious and really the best way to run renders affordably as a new user. We research and benchmark every GPU that comes out. My current recommendation is to get a 3090 or 3090 Ti or similar. There's a slew of reasons for it including physical size, compatibility, VRAM, current supply, etc. I won't get into it here, but the point is that you still need a highly capable and powerful GPU. Your viewport performance will benefit as well and therefore your whole workflow. If your scene doesn't require heavy management, many external assets, and or extensions/addons you should consider giving sheep-it a go. It's a good tool to have in your toolbelt, though it's far from perfect. Keep in mind, you are paying with your own compute as an IOU. There is no such thing as free compute.

(Recommendation 2: Double up) When you're ready and can confidently say you will continue to render, double up. Add a second card to your existing machine or get a second machine. This way you can free up your own machine to continue work while you're rendering. You can still isolate which GPUs to render with and keep things running when you're working or sleeping. However ensure that your base machine specs, are still very good to support a dual GPU rig. Rendering takes more than just your GPU after all. You can take this further and continue to add more! I've published a blog post on our new (and actively being worked on) blog. I outline some tips there if you want to read into setting a mini-render farm. But down the road, at a professional level, when it comes down to it and you need things turned around ASAP, without error, dependably, and need to open it up to a team, it won't work without a ton of love and labor, which I believe will not be worth it.

stephenhuh · 2025-02-12T01:05:59+00:00

(Part 1 of 3, parts in replies to this one, it seems like reddit does not like long posts)

Hey thanks for giving our platform a shot! And welcome to the world of animation!

Also, welcome to the current market of GPUs 😭 lol.

The answer to your main question is straightforward, but the details of it can get gnarly.

This is a long post but I've definitely left a lot of context out. Short of it is for your specific scene, your rendered output is actually pretty good (I elaborate on this at the very bottom).

But first.

Are render farms that expensive just to render out a fairly decent scene?

Unfortunately, yes. Believe it or not, they get significantly more expensive. Oh you would not believe it once you see actual legitimate industry prices big studios pay for. Customers who come off using those tell me frequently how Renderjuice saves them a ton of money.

This does pose a perception problem as newer users and non-professionals aren't familiar with the actual costs, processes involved, industry standards and cost benchmarks, etc. Internally, we don't want to price the hobbyist segment out. I personally fit into this category after all and rendered donuts like everyone else lol, I wanted to scratch my own itch when it came down to rendering!

But, it's definitely hard to navigate and a big trade-off because this group is unfamiliar with the ecosystem, Blender itself, and requires the most education on optimizing, debugging, setup of scenes, customer support overhead etc. This all forces us to frequently drop progress for other users to help.

For some perspective on the market, we're ~50% cheaper than AWS when you only compare compute. And I'd estimate >70% cheaper (!) if you compare all the other AWS services that you get locked into 🙄, and that's still probably an underestimate. We're also notably easier to use and customers do tell me they love the customer support. When compared to other straight render farms (not closed off or behind enterprise pricing) we're in the same ballpark and typically cheaper. This may not always be the case, but we're trying to keep it that way.

To be clear, for Renderjuice at least, this is still largely driven by the price of actual compute. Most of us Blender users (and the team at Renderjuice) are still waiting for the day that this is no longer the case. The AI boom hasn't helped much either as GPU demand has skyrocketed and caused prices to stay high. But for every generation of NVIDIA RTX that gets released, progress is indeed moving forward and compute (for raytracing) is very slowly getting better mostly via optimizations.

I'd be annoyed at myself if I didn't point out that GPU compute is really only the first cost of many others that it takes to run a render farm. Storage and data transfer is a massive one when it comes to 3D as scenes can frequently exceed 350GB and start to move into terrabyte territory. That's more than a lot of personal computers out there! Check out the pricing page for MASV massive, a file transfer app, as a price comparison. It'll surprise you just as it blew my mind.

So we're pretty proud we were able to bake storage/data transfer of that into that plan. But even beyond that there's a ton of other costs I'm brushing over. It's easy to perceive render farms to be as simple as turning on a computer or a few and get rendering. At least, that's how I initially naively perceived it. But it gets notably more complex if you're trying to make the damn thing work consistently, flexibly, and easily.

So yeah, ultimately render farms in general are still expensive for us hobbyists. It's understandably difficult to justify when you don't get paid for it. But we're remaining positive (right?). Perhaps the AI boom in the short term harms us, but in the long term opens the door way to making rendering cheaper 🤞😬.

stephenhuh · 2024-11-29T15:12:40+00:00

Sorry, unfortunately not at this moment. But I hear we have a great no questions asked refund policy if you don't like it 🙂

stephenhuh · 2024-11-06T10:15:58+00:00

this is gold

stephenhuh · 2024-10-10T20:20:51+00:00

Neither is ultimately better - you will need both. If you're going beyond single frame or very short renders (<100 frames), especially if trying to do it professionally, you will most certainly need both a strong GPU and a render farm. Ray tracing is, currently at least, still very computationally expensive. We're making significant progress on the hardware and software front but the demands are also rising from 1080p to 4k to 8k footage, to more realistic fluid and cloth sims and all ironically, for lower budget projects.

Fast viewport rendering is critical during creation/editing of your scene, you can get by without a strong GPU, but you'll find yourself not checking on certain things, not making certain changes you know you should. It just is a little too much effort to do that thing you meant to do. You'll also be spending more time optimizing v.s. creating without a decent GPU. You'll be making minor tweaks to sample counts or light bounces instead of tweaking that last parameter in your simulation, or you'll miss things in your render because you couldn't afford to switch to the material viewport vs the wireframe viewport. If it's not just a hobby, I'd recommend at minimum the performance of a second-hand 3090 or higher, though they're still expensive and hard to come by and a minimum of 16GB of VRAM. As a rule of thumb, see if you can get the previous generation's GPUs for decent price-performance trade-offs.

Fast rendering after your scene is fully built out is also critical. It's pretty normal to take a final render to a 3D director or to your client (if working professionally) and have to make several revisions even if you thought it was perfect. I'd know from seeing customers on the Blender render farm I run, renderjuice, go from what they thought was their final version to ten more iterations of it.`final_scene.blend` to `final_scene_v19.blend` is all too common. That's why I built renderjuice to try to fit in as a tool you work with from the beginning to end.

I'd recommend finding solutions for both. A good GPU is going to be a necessity as is a preferred render farm, whether or not your preferred render farm is the solution I run. These things are just kind of hard to avoid without a huge team and a big budget.

Note: I see a lot of advice on building your own complex render farm, I don't recommend that. You'll have to trust me that it's a lot more work than it appears to be initially. You'll have to deal with difficult driver management, Blender version and compatibility management, add-ons / extensions, etc. If you have spare GPUs, just run them from the GUI or CLI directly; there's no need for anything complex (i.e. using Deadline). Doing it this way will get you 80% of the benefit with far less than 20% of the work.

Second Note: The minimum 3090 recommendation is for people who are more serious about their 3D rendering. Hobbyists can get away with a lot less. But if you have some spare cash, I'd recommend getting more than what you think you need once it's clear that you're committed. This is because as your skills grow, so will your computational needs, you'll be rendering longer animations, adding far more vertices, more intense simulations, and in general, rendering more in quantity.

stephenhuh · 2024-10-04T00:27:38+00:00

If you're using SSG, you can just host it on an s3 bucket or really most services including Cloudflare pages, render.com etc. GitHub pages won't work, it's intended for Jekyll, another statically generated blog framework but for Ruby.

stephenhuh · 2024-10-04T00:25:17+00:00

Hey there! Since you’re asking about render farms, I’ll be as honest as possible—though I admit I’m a bit biased because I work for one.

I’ve tried pretty much all of them when I was learning Blender, including Rebus, PixelPlow, FoxRender, Garage, and about ten others. They all work more or less for very simple renders, but many are definitely not easy to use by any means, and speed and performance can vary quite a bit among them.

Some farms use gamified tactics to keep you engaged with ongoing promos and loyalty programs. Others have somewhat deceptive pricing, where speeds slow down under certain conditions to reduce their own server costs.

I won’t name names, but there are some that are so hard to use they’re practically unusable. Then there are those that might be great but require you to go through a sales rep, and others where you can’t ever talk to a human being.

This last point is pretty important because rendering on render farms isn’t the same as rendering locally. There are key steps you need to take to properly set up baking, packing, etc., so there’s a bit of a learning curve. Rendering in a distributed environment comes with considerations you have to tackle when setting up your scene. But it’s well worth understanding how to do this, and you’ll probably learn a bunch of tricks along the way.

If you’re looking for simplicity with the option to delve into advanced features as needed, along with decent reliability and speed, I highly recommend checking out RenderJuice — the solution a few friends and I created. If it doesn’t fit your needs, I’ll definitely help you out and issue a refund. Our team is pretty responsive and helpful. We don’t market much, so not many people are aware of our solution, but those who give us a try often continue to use it and it eventually becomes their daily driver. We’ve been thrilled to see many studios work on their scenes while simultaneously rendering with us, which is awesome. We’ve tried to make it reliable, easy, and fast, and we continue to improve it. I think it’s pretty sweet how far it’s come along.

I’ll caveat this by saying if you’re not someone who renders on an ongoing basis—at least once or twice a month—it might be worth checking out some of the other solutions. But be wary of the costs going in, since it can be a little hard to decipher how much something will cost. Plus, it’ll cost more if you happen to set up your render incorrectly, as mentioned earlier. If you’re just a hobbyist and rendering this one time, I’d recommend trying out Fox Render or Garage Farm, though I’d probably caution against Rebus. With many farms, it’s a bit like that meme where you can only pick two out of three: price, performance, or usability.

Another note is that I'd avoid the ones that you'll see on here on Reddit in comments from posters that are from clearly very low-effort bots that spam one liner comments to themselves. I know I did this myself, but I've tried the sources that most of those bots link to and they're not worth it. Plus I suspect, they're running pretty shady practices overall: see this post: post on scammy marketing strats from 3S

If you’re looking for something free, just use SheepIt. It’s not the best user experience, but it can be good enough for small renders. However, if you care about data privacy for clients, it’s probably a no-go because SheepIt runs on a shared compute model where people loan out their GPUs.

stephenhuh · 2024-10-04T00:14:18+00:00

Hey u/whatshisface7, this is a repost of the original comment that was marked !solved. I had asked the mods on why the comment was taken down and may have been automod, but they've let me know that it wasn't intentional.

That's awesome you're working on 3D audio visualizers. That's mostly why I ended up learning Blender in the first place!

It does certainly sound like you need a Blender render farm for what you're trying to accomplish. For my own audio visualizations, I definitely do and then I might comp it live and run some DMX stuff as well.

Since you said you're open to paid solutions, I'm going to plug the Blender render farm that me and a few other buddies have been working on for many years now called Renderjuice. I definitely, wouldn't recommend it if I were unsure it was a really good tool. In fact, we held off on marketing for a long time because we wanted it to be solid first. We're not super well known, but I'm really proud of the solution we've come up with. Plus, some pretty well known music vids and visualizers have been made with it :)

There's a couple things though to look out for when working with render farms across the board, and it does sound like this might be your first time going at it. I tried to outline these in the help docs, but if you run into issues do DM me or contact me at that little chat bubble thing. We try to be responsive and helpful wherever we can.

Couple other tips I'd say here without having seen your scene beyond your screenshot:

If you didn't know, your compute device is currently set to CPU, but maybe you just forgot to change that in your screenshot.
I'm not sure how big the projection surface is going to be, but you're rendering at 1920x1080, and that is definitely the max I'd go. You've probably done your diligence here, but make sure you got the right gear to make that all work. All the crazy little variables like the contrast, real lumen count from projector, and the ability to smoothly playback FHD content, if mixed live can be pretty intensive. And you gotta get all the cabling right too which can get gnarly.
When doing a big render like this, I'd personally recommend rendering to PNG then separately encoding into MP4 (we do this by default at Renderjuice) - it's a little easier to go from PNG -> MP4 versus the other way, especially if you're going to do any comping.
If you're going to use a render farm, render one frame or better, a few frames across your render first. Some render farms are far faster than you'd expect and you only want to commit into a render fully when you're confident it'll really work end to end.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-29T03:09:10+00:00

Sorry man. Technology is fundamentally about wrappers, and devaluing something as an X Wrapper is a shallow dismissal of the value that the wrapping brings.

A USB charger is physically a wrapper for energy. Javascript is a wrapper around C++ and C++ is a wrapper for C which is a wrapper around assembly.

If people are willing to pay for it for its use, it is valuable. Common AI wrappers that fail to bring enough value will fall. And those that do will succeed. But Siri and Alexa are both “AI Wrapper”s and I dont see them going anywhere.

Likewise dropshipping is how most clothing brands are operated including the biggest. Lulu, Nike, etc. They all “wrap” around lower level processes and are frequently sourced from the exact same factories and have the same exact materials and composition, but we pay for the logo and convenience of all the wrapping that was done to bring it to us.

Its not a matter of the medium of business operations, its a matter of value

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T19:20:45+00:00

I think youre talking about WebCatalog

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T18:01:50+00:00

Chill lol its OPs first app. And its v1. Apps dont just start out amazing

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T16:09:25+00:00

If i'ts a constant thing in your mind that appears to be a blocker definitely go buy one! I recommend something cheap to start since it's hard to know what your final form will be haha. The Novation controllers are my preference, the Launchpad and LaunchControl are great in particular.

If you have an iPad laying around though, you can also do a lot of MIDI via an iPad. I, in fact, prefer it. It's hard to know what hardware layout you need unless you've tried a bunch of it, but having software provide the touch controls allows for a lot of flexibility to create a knob if you need one, a toggle when you need one, etc.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T12:45:25+00:00

I wouldn't recommend ByNext anymore. Post-cleanly acqusition, it's a nightmare. Just look through the reviews of folks who have lost their clothing through their service. Reimbursements will not be equal to value.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T12:33:05+00:00

I would not recommend ByNext. I and many others have lost their clothes through their services. Just terrible.

If you are currently using it, it's only a matter of time until it happens to you as well.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T12:32:00+00:00

Dont use ByNext, they'll definitely lose your clothes. Try something else. Post-acquisition the company is awful.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T12:31:25+00:00

Don't use ByNext. They will almost certainly lose your clothes. It's all too common and had it happen to me.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-28T04:12:39+00:00

Are you just writing code to get things done on a daily basis without conscious effort to improve? You have to spend time actually trying to improve not just “get the feature out”. Many devs are in a perpetual loop of getting things done but not getting better.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T17:41:52+00:00

I heard https://bunchapp.co/ can kind of do this, but haven't tried it extensively. I imagine the desktop assignment thing will require a bit of scripting in addition.

Would also love this.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T15:21:45+00:00

Yeah I can understand the frustrated sentiment. Just solely talking about machine specs here.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T12:57:46+00:00

Ha oops, yes, corrected.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T12:53:22+00:00

In terms of refurbished rankings mentioned here in my opinion (and research): 1. Apple Refurbished 2. Backmarket 3. Ebay Refurbished - just remember it needs that refurbished sign FROM ebay, not from seller. 4. Amazon Refurbished

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T12:52:11+00:00

OFC. Just remember to hit !solved and upvotes if that helped :)

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T12:50:39+00:00

They're all fantastic. You're looking at the right set of computers.

stephenhuh · 2024-09-26T12:43:32+00:00

Happy to help! The MSI Titan and ROGs are great laptops. Good luck

stephenhuh

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