Amazon Web Services (AWS) to render

[User_897603]

I'm pursuing AWS certifications at the moment to upgrade my utility as a sys admin while I job hunt. I noticed that amazon has rendering available as a service. I'm curious if anyone has explored using it and how much it would cost. I'm wondering what say the last milfy city update of 1200 images and some animations would cost to crank out in say a month with that quality. If no one has an answer I might just try doing like 10 and see what the bill would be.

 

[Rich]

I'm guessing you're talking about this:

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Looks interesting, but the bigger question is "rendering with what application?" An awful lot of "stuff" here is created with Daz Studio, which isn't among their supported applications. If you were using Blender or Octane or Maya or one of their supported applications, this might be interesting. Big question is whether one of their setups will render significantly faster than your desktop - enough faster that it's worth the $.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Big question is whether one of their setups will render significantly faster than your desktop - enough faster that it's worth the $.

For me the speed is secondary. Like it's not your computer, if it take one more hour it's not a big deal (expect that it will cost more). I mean, it's still a second computer doing the rendering while you can work on the next scene, render a scene yourself, or whatever else.
So, I think the question is more : How many scenes can you render before it cost you the same price than a second computer.
Because if it cost you one new computer each, don't know let's say 200 scenes, it's better to spend this money directly on the said new computer. You'll render way more scenes for the same price.

 

[User_897603]

nd how much it would cost. I'm wondering what say the last milfy city update of 1200 images and some animations would cost to crank out in say a m

 

[User_897603]

Good points. I also live somewhere with cheap hydro. I haven't checked, but I'd also hope the crash of crypto currency pricing would bring down the prices of GPUs which were outrageous last time I checked when I was contemplating building a new rig.

 

[khumak]

For me the speed is secondary. Like it's not your computer, if it take one more hour it's not a big deal (expect that it will cost more). I mean, it's still a second computer doing the rendering while you can work on the next scene, render a scene yourself, or whatever else.
So, I think the question is more : How many scenes can you render before it cost you the same price than a second computer.
Because if it cost you one new computer each, don't know let's say 200 scenes, it's better to spend this money directly on the said new computer. You'll render way more scenes for the same price.

Well it's also a matter of scale. A single computer can only do so much rendering at one time. If you could set up a series of scenes to render in the cloud you could potentially render them all at the same time whereas if you were relying on your own personal computers you'd only have probably 1 or 2 dedicated rendering boxes. So you could do a lot more with cloud resources in the same time. I have no idea what the cost pencils out to though. Also as Rich mentioned, if they don't support Daz then you're probably out of luck since you'd be comparing the cost of using free software on your own box vs expensive, licensed software in the cloud.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Also as Rich mentioned, if they don't support Daz then you're probably out of luck since you'd be comparing the cost of using free software on your own box vs expensive, licensed software in the cloud.

@Rich also mentioned blender, but I didn't see it, neither in the page he linked, nor on the

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site. As for the price, well, it's the deadline license ($48/year), the render software license, and after it's

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(between $0.0052/hour and $24.48/hour, depending of your needs).

 

[User_897603]

@Rich also mentioned blender, but I didn't see it, neither in the page he linked, nor on the

You must be registered to see the links

site. As for the price, well, it's the deadline license ($48/year), the render software license, and after it's

You must be registered to see the links

(between $0.0052/hour and $24.48/hour, depending of your needs).

Woah, that's quite the spread on price. I was mainly interested because so much of the developers' time is spent waiting weeks to render their images. If you have a subscription based game and you can reliably deliver updates on a schedule I'd think that would improve patreon numbers. But obviously, the big question is how much would it carve into earnings and there aren't that many devs making a decent amount of money, ie enough to live off of.

As was mentioned, being able to do a bunch of jobs in parallel would be a huge benefit, especially for devs holding down regular jobs. Kick them off and let them run and manage them remotely from whereever.

 

[Rich]

@Rich also mentioned blender, but I didn't see it, neither in the page he linked, nor on the

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site.

Blender is mentioned under "Application Plugins" in the FAQ

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Woah, that's quite the spread on price.

Yes, EC2 instances come in all different shapes and sizes, with all different costs. And that's the big question - given an EC2 instance at $X per hour, how fast does it render? All sorts of variables in that, of course - application, scene complexity, etc.

If you have a subscription based game and you can reliably deliver updates on a schedule I'd think that would improve patreon numbers.

Sure, provided you're delivering quality content. But the question is whether the limiting factor is rendering, or whether it's the time and effort preparing the individual scenes and/or animations. My own experience is that I usually spend more time setting up an individual scene than the scene takes to render. (I batch render overnight.) Animations are another case, of course - there the rendering time can well exceed the setup time.

But obviously, the big question is how much would it carve into overhead and there aren't that many devs making a decent amount of money, ie enough to live off of.

Exactly. Let's suppose someone was, indeed, working on this full time. If you assume that they spent an 8-hour day preparing scenes to render, the main question would be whether those scenes could be done rendering on that same computer in the other 16 hours a day, so as to not hold up the developer working on the next day's worth. The next level up would be the developer having two machines - one for preparing scenes and a second for more or less full-time rendering. But if you're dealing with that kind of rendering load, I'm betting you could set up a custom-built rendering machine for what it would cost you for a couple of months of comparable rendering on an EC2 instance.

As one example, the AWS Windows "m5.4xlarge" instance type has 16 virtual CPU's and 64Gb of RAM. Costs $1.50/hour. If you keep that puppy running full time for a month, it'll cost you about $1,080 on Amazon. Doesn't take too many months of that to equal what an equivalent desktop would cost. (An AMD Threadripper has 24 cores, by comparison, and you can get a pretty well equipped machine with one of those for maybe $3,000.)

All that's assuming CPU rendering, but you have all the same kinds of questions when it comes to GPU rendering as well.

So, yes, very interesting question, but my gut feel is that it won't pay for the indie developer. But that's just a guess...

 

[anne O'nymous]

Blender is mentioned under "Application Plugins" in the FAQ

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My bad, didn't goes this deep. Don't know enough yet on the subject, but I remember reading that you can import Daz3D scene in Blender. So, you probably can also render them with it ?

Yes, EC2 instances come in all different shapes and sizes, with all different costs. And that's the big question - given an EC2 instance at $X per hour, how fast does it render? All sorts of variables in that, of course - application, scene complexity, etc.

I would add, "and how fast do you want it to render the scene". Looking at the price range, in the end of the month it can cost you less to take an option that will take 2 hours to render the scene, than picking one that will only take 1 hour. This for the same number of scenes rendered.

The next level up would be the developer having two machines [...]
(An AMD Threadripper has 24 cores, by comparison, and you can get a pretty well equipped machine with one of those for maybe $3,000.)

All that's assuming CPU rendering, but you have all the same kinds of questions when it comes to GPU rendering as well.

As far as I understood it, either you need the right GPU and a lot of RAM, or a strong CPU and the OS cache will replace the lack of RAM. So you can probably build your own machine for less that $3000. If you goes for the GPU, you can pick an average CPU, or an cheap GPU if you choose the CPU option ; in this case the GPU embed with the motherboard can even be enough.
You can also reduce the cost by reusing an old monitor if you have one, and you don't need an overpriced wireless keyboard and mouse, or a DVD reader.
Don't know the cost in the US (nor the change in fact), but here you should have what you need around 2000€. Perhaps even less if you buy at the right time.

So, yes, very interesting question, but my gut feel is that it won't pay for the indie developer. But that's just a guess...

Same here. It's more for big companies that need to punctually render thousands of scenes. Too much to do it with the machines they own, and not often enough to buy the machines they needs.

 

[muttdoggy]

Here in the US, a x399 mobo costs about 300 usd, a Threadripper 2950x (16 core 32 threads 3.5-4.4ghz, Quad-Channel DDR4 and 64 PCIe lanes with 40mb cache) is about 900, a liquid cooler is about 80, 32gb of 3200mhz DDR4 RAM is around 300, a good case is about 80, 850 watt modular gold power supply is 100. That's 1760 so far. Then if you add a GTX 1080 TI with 11gb, the total is closer to 2400-2500. BUT that configuration should render scenes in minutes, not hours. If you have 2500-3000 laying around, it's better to build a render station. It's a one time purchase but be cautioned.. it will increase the power bill slightly.
Edited.. need to add my friend who does rendering for an ad agency is building that exact configuration for a "Render Beast". He already renders in minutes with a rzyen 1800x system that cost him 1k. Not including the 1060 ti.

 

[Rich]

My bad, didn't goes this deep. Don't know enough yet on the subject, but I remember reading that you can import Daz3D scene in Blender. So, you probably can also render them with it ?

No worries.

Yes, you can export Daz figures to Blender and render them there. But, from what I'm given to understand, it requires a bit of work to get the materials right, since the two are using fundamentally different shader logic. Not much different than exporting to, say, Octane and rendering there, which is something frequently discussed on the Daz forums. Each of the various renderers has its adherents, and each probably has its own strengths and weaknesses. (A number of people say Octane is significantly faster then iRay, and there's a plugin that will let you compose a scene in Daz Studio and then export to Octane to render. With some material and lighting fiddling, of course. When Octane 4 is fully released, there's supposedly going to be a free version - could be interesting to experiment.)

But we all know how easy it is to get materials, particularly skin, looking right. (Heavy sarcasm, big eyeroll... LOL) So the folks taking Daz assets to other renders is always probably going to be a significant minority compared to those sticking with iRay.

I would add, "and how fast do you want it to render the scene". Looking at the price range, in the end of the month it can cost you less to take an option that will take 2 hours to render the scene, than picking one that will only take 1 hour. This for the same number of scenes rendered.

Yes, quite true. The other thing is that you can shut down EC2 instances when you're not using them and not get charged for them, so the example I gave was if you basically kept the machine going full time. If you're only using the machine part-time, you'd spend less. You're only charged for each hour (or part of an hour) that the machine is actually running. (Well, you still pay for the machine's storage when it's off, but that rate is trivial - like $0.10 per gigabyte per month.)

As far as I understood it, either you need the right GPU and a lot of RAM, or a strong CPU and the OS cache will replace the lack of RAM. So you can probably build your own machine for less that $3000.

Quite true - I kind of pulled that number out of the air based on a quick peek at one or two gaming sites. A big question is whether the renderer in question even uses the GPU. I know that Daz's iRay does, Daz's 3Delight does not, Blender and Octane both can. Of those, Blender is the only one I know that will work with AMD GPU's, although Octane was supposed to be working on it. (That's far from an exhaustive list - it's just the ones I know anything about.)

It's more for big companies that need to punctually render thousands of scenes. Too much to do it with the machines they own, and not often enough to buy the machines they needs.

That's my sense of what this is targeting. Plus, it can sometimes be a lot cheaper, in the long run, to "rent" a bunch of virtual machines for the period you need them, and then "turn them back in" when the massive render project is done. You can scale up and scale down what you need, when you need it. Finally, there's the hidden cost of space, power, cooling, maintenance and support staff when you own your own hardware. All those are reasons you're seeing a lot of companies migrating their infrastructure "to the cloud."

That being said, it _is_ going to be interesting to see where iRay Server and some of the other renderers go over time. If one or more of them decides to optimize for the type of services that AWS provides, things could change.

 

[khumak]

The other thing is that you can shut down EC2 instances when you're not using them and not get charged for them, so the example I gave was if you basically kept the machine going full time. If you're only using the machine part-time, you'd spend less. You're only charged for each hour (or part of an hour) that the machine is actually running. (Well, you still pay for the machine's storage when it's off, but that rate is trivial - like $0.10 per gigabyte per month.)

That's my sense of what this is targeting. Plus, it can sometimes be a lot cheaper, in the long run, to "rent" a bunch of virtual machines for the period you need them, and then "turn them back in" when the massive render project is done. You can scale up and scale down what you need, when you need it. Finally, there's the hidden cost of space, power, cooling, maintenance and support staff when you own your own hardware. All those are reasons you're seeing a lot of companies migrating their infrastructure "to the cloud."

The above points are why I would potentially be interested in doing it if I was doing this full time. I live in a relatively small condo so if buying CPU/GPU time from AWS was even in the same ballpark as buying my own dedicated machine, the cloud would be preferable even if it was a little more expensive especially if I wasn't using it 24x7. I already have a separate computer for personal use vs work in my home office. A 3rd box would definitely be in the way.

I imagine over time I'll get better at setting scenes up but I suspect I'd have a hard time getting to the point where I could keep a full time rendering box fed with enough scenes to render 24x7 and still have time to write the dialog and code for the associated scenes and occasionally do things that don't involve a computer like eat/sleep/etc. The situation might be different for someone working as a dedicated artist on a project just doing nothing but rendering.

 

[Rich]

The above points are why I would potentially be interested in doing it if I was doing this full time. I live in a relatively small condo so if buying CPU/GPU time from AWS was even in the same ballpark as buying my own dedicated machine, the cloud would be preferable even if it was a little more expensive especially if I wasn't using it 24x7. I already have a separate computer for personal use vs work in my home office. A 3rd box would definitely be in the way.

Everybody's situation is different of course - that makes perfect sense. Given that, I think the main issue would be figuring out what renderer would work in that environment. According to the AWS site, they do have EC2 instances that have NVidia Tesla GPU's, and a comment on the Daz forum suggests that the Tesla can be used for iRay rendering. (The Tesla family is compute-only - they don't have video output - but that's OK in this situation.)

So I guess the thing to try would be to spin up one of those systems with Windows on it, and try and install Daz Studio and give it a whirl. Assuming you're using Daz that is - same would apply for Blender or something else. Of course, it also means replicating your product inventory up there, but that's "just" a question of uploading files.

I'll also be a slight nudge and point out that the Daz Studio license doesn't 100% address this situation. Assuming you care, of course. LOL The license says you're allowed to copy content onto "computers owned or controlled by User". There was some debate a while back on the forums as to whether a virtual machine that you "own" qualified under this - I don't remember the outcome. It seems a reasonable interpretation that you "control" the virtual machine, but lawyers aren't always reasonable. (As I recall, some of the question was whether, in this situation, the virtual machine qualified as a "computer," or whether "computer" would mean the box on which the VM was running, which you don't own or control.)

I imagine over time I'll get better at setting scenes up but I suspect I'd have a hard time getting to the point where I could keep a full time rendering box fed with enough scenes to render 24x7 and still have time to write the dialog and code for the associated scenes and occasionally do things that don't involve a computer like eat/sleep/etc. The situation might be different for someone working as a dedicated artist on a project just doing nothing but rendering.

Ya, exactly. I tend to work with DS in the evening - crank out 1-6 scenes (depending on how similar they are to one another) over the course of an hour or three and then set them up to batch render overnight on the same machine. But I have a desktop with good GPU support - trying to do that on a laptop not designed for it would probably be painful. And possibly detrimental to the laptop, since they're not usually designed to run full-tilt for long periods of time.

Anyway, best of luck in your explorations. I'd be very interested in hearing about your results if you do go forward on this.

 

[anne O'nymous]

It seems a reasonable interpretation that you "control" the virtual machine, but lawyers aren't always reasonable. (As I recall, some of the question was whether, in this situation, the virtual machine qualified as a "computer," or whether "computer" would mean the box on which the VM was running, which you don't own or control.)

Legally speaking, they could argue that you control the OS or the session (for cloud sharing), but not the computer itself. Whatever the power you have on the software, you have none regarding the hardware.
This said, this "computers owned or controlled by User" is probably here more to prevent you to share the assets, than anything else. They will never give a definitive answer (it would close too many gates) but they'll also probably not really care. At least as long as you don't go "hey, with my friends/team we own some EC2 session that we use for the rendering". Doing otherwise would imply that they don't trust Amazon (or any other company, depending of the service you'll use).

 

[Rich]

I just figured I'd mention that issue since I'd seen it raised on the forums. As long as you're not sharing the instance with anyone else, this is one of those situations where I think we could probably agree that you're staying within the spirit of the agreement even if someone wants to quibble over the exact definition of terms. Not really functionally different from leasing a physical computer from someone and using Daz on it. (I'm betting that's why the "or controlled by" clause is in there.)

Full disclosure: I'm not a lawyer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...