What's your favorite online render farm?

BC Rice

I sent out a few requests to spot who handle Carrara. Was wondering if anyone had any experience with a good online render farm.

Or, if you built your own -- how'd you go about that?

Bunyip02

A couple of threads that might be of interest -

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/112451/carrara-not-using-all-of-my-render-nodes-solved

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/140026/carrara-render-nodes

cdordoni

I don't know if Carrara or Grid support any of the online stuff. Its possible to rent/buy computing time but the application needs to support it.

As I understand it, a rendering service would need to have a license of Carrara and Grid  and a network of physical computers. A Carrara file with all the required models, textures, shaders etc. could be handed off in that case, and the results uploaded somewhere. However, giving someone models to render out for you would like violate licensing issues with the models, even if they were embedded in a Carrara file.

BC Rice

cdordoni said:

I don't know if Carrara or Grid support any of the online stuff. Its possible to rent/buy computing time but the application needs to support it.

As I understand it, a rendering service would need to have a license of Carrara and Grid  and a network of physical computers. A Carrara file with all the required models, textures, shaders etc. could be handed off in that case, and the results uploaded somewhere. However, giving someone models to render out for you would like violate licensing issues with the models, even if they were embedded in a Carrara file.

Can that really be true, though? Render farms are used routinely to render out assets purchased via 3rd party vendors -- and all those parties have identical usage terms to Carrara/DAZ. You're inferring that all render farms are inherently "illegal" to use unless you've modeled everything being rendered. I feel like there's an intrinsic flaw to that logic somewhere. Not sure where the flaw lies, haha, but it seems really odd that no one could ever use a 3rd party asset in conjunction with a render farm. 

cdordoni

BC Rice said:

cdordoni said:

I don't know if Carrara or Grid support any of the online stuff. Its possible to rent/buy computing time but the application needs to support it.

As I understand it, a rendering service would need to have a license of Carrara and Grid  and a network of physical computers. A Carrara file with all the required models, textures, shaders etc. could be handed off in that case, and the results uploaded somewhere. However, giving someone models to render out for you would like violate licensing issues with the models, even if they were embedded in a Carrara file.

Can that really be true, though? Render farms are used routinely to render out assets purchased via 3rd party vendors -- and all those parties have identical usage terms to Carrara/DAZ. You're inferring that all render farms are inherently "illegal" to use unless you've modeled everything being rendered. I feel like there's an intrinsic flaw to that logic somewhere. Not sure where the flaw lies, haha, but it seems really odd that no one could ever use a 3rd party asset in conjunction with a render farm. 

If the data is transmitted in a format where the content cannot be extracted, then that would not violate usage.

I believe there are ways to render without distributing copies of files. If the content stays on your computer, and the remote systems are essentially rendering "buckets" where only chunks of data are sent, I don't belive there's an issue there.

There is some clarification required. Its difficult to believe the issue has not come up before, but if no one can point to an area where it is clearly stated then Daz will need to clarify it.

BC Rice

Here's an email I just got back. Makes sense now. Basically you download an app on your computer and the app is connected to the cloud so you basically have access to the render farm but aren't actually giving them anything, I guess. 

cdordoni

They say they support Carrara, but it appears they are basically renting out a windows computer albeit virtually. Maybe Carrara would have to be installed on it?

BC Rice

cdordoni said:

They say they support Carrara, but it appears they are basically renting out a windows computer albeit virtually. Maybe Carrara would have to be installed on it?

I'm not sure. I don't know exactly how it all works. I'll probably test them out, so I'll let you know. 

stringtheory9

Why pay $20 an hour when you can run it on a 36 core AWS private instance for $1.50 an hour?