GPU Cloud Rendering?

[CellStudios]

My computer is a little on the slow side, got 2 GTX 1060ti GPU's ( not the best I know ) and my rendering time is terrible, I've tried rendering with and without the CPU but that doesn't make a difference. I'm fine for rendering with 1 character but anything more than that and my pc will either freeze making it unusable till the render has finished ( about 2-3 hours ) or no matter how long I render for the image will be pixelated.

I've heard of cloud rendering before, I've heard good things about a company called PaperSpace but the price is a little on the high side, there basic package being almost $300 a month which is insane to me. I've also heard of a gaming compant out of France called shadow but they seem to be on pre-order until April, there pricing seem a little to good to be true but if there legit I'd love to find another company like them, I've tried google but every result just comes up with prices more on the PaperSpace side.

Any ideas on options?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

the nice thing about companies is that they support different softwares.
The only free clound renderer is for blender only, sheep it, and if you want to do nsfw stuff you have to be in a private group to render it, so then you have to find people who would be ok with nsfw stuff (this will show previews of renders on their computer so they can't have everyone render your stuff publically), but I haven't found a private group yet, and again, it only works if you move to blender.

 

[neekleer]

I don't know if you meant shadow.tech, which is for the US only right now. It's $12.99 USD / month for a limited time. You also have to pay $10 for 1 TB storage if I remember correctly. So, that sounds like a pretty good deal. You can actually lie about your address even if you are nowhere near the states they are in, and you may have to get past their location detection in the browser to sign up initially. Massive input delay shouldn't matter much if you are just rendering. I am guessing this would work since the GPU sounds decent by the spec alone. There may be an issue if they want you to be actually actively gaming for them to consider you a legitimate user of their service.

This guy did it:

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There may be simpler file transfer (P2P over the internet) programs, but I know anydesk has nice file transfer that can be used independent of screen sharing and control (which is its primary function).

 

[Deleted member 1931428]

I was looking through different options just a few days ago. Rendering takes a lot of juice and time, therefore I will seriously consider using cloud services for it for my future developments. Microsoft's Azure has their N-tiers, which seem to be based on NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. In my previous life I managed to trim down the VM services to bare minimum and by doing so the price came down quite a bit. I also had to weigh down on the facts of costs vs. time it takes to render with my current hardware. Rendering faster enables a faster rework on the renders, no need to wait over night and then realize the renders look like crap.

Here is some information:

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I wonder if the free Azure account and $200 credit for new accounts could be used for the Azure Batch, which Microsoft themselves advertise for rendering purposes. Otherwise there might be a way to split the costs with others for rendering needs, a little too early for myself at the moment though.

 

[polywog]

Do you work in an office where hundreds of employees go home at night, leaving their workstations unattended?
If so, you may already be a winner. Cloud rendering doesn't require monthly subscription fees, it just needs network access to a number of computers that it can take advantage of.

check with a university or large corporation in your area and ask them what they do with their e-waste buy a few pallets of last year model computers to make yourself a render farm. a few hundred dollars, and you haul them home. without much effort you can have 50 nodes crunching your renders all at the same time

and you're doing the planet a favor keeping these toxic materials out of a landfill

 

[Deleted member 1931428]

Do you work in an office where hundreds of employees go home at night, leaving their workstations unattended?
If so, you may already be a winner. Cloud rendering doesn't require monthly subscription fees, it just needs network access to a number of computers that it can take advantage of.

check with a university or large corporation in your area and ask them what they do with their e-waste buy a few pallets of last year model computers to make yourself a render farm. a few hundred dollars, and you haul them home. without much effort you can have 50 nodes crunching your renders all at the same time
View attachment 519098
and you're doing the planet a favor keeping these toxic materials out of a landfill

Companies and organizations do throw out huge amounts of hardware, even if they are 3-4 years old. Once the warranty expires they do not wish to take chances with them. It is a huge shame, personally I am all in for recycling rather than seeing that stuff end up in nature. I would be scared of my electric bill, though. Electricity is expensive at least here in the polar circles.

 

[khumak]

I haven't tried to price it out myself, but I suspect you're probably better off buying your own rendering machine unless you're looking at a workflow that is bursty enough that you need to be able to dramatically scale up the CPU/GPU cyles you're using and then also scale it back down again easily when things are slower. You'd be wasting money on hardware you're not using a lot of the time if you built your own systems for that.

Or if your overall workload is so high that you're contemplating having to lease an actual office to build your own little mini data center. Then cloud would make sense. If you're talking 1-2 desktop PC's worth of horsepower I'd bet you're better off just building your own system.

 

[polywog]

Companies and organizations do throw out huge amounts of hardware, even if they are 3-4 years old. Once the warranty expires they do not wish to take chances with them. It is a huge shame, personally I am all in for recycling rather than seeing that stuff end up in nature. I would be scared of my electric bill, though. Electricity is expensive at least here in the polar circles.

a PC uses about 200 watts/ hour a few hundred kW/ year you'd save on your heating costs.

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[goditseb]

Future in GPU Cloud rendering ?!

However, we have zero tolerance when it comes to the glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape, and child exploitation blablablabla, but its okay for Pedowood etc blablabla

YOU WANNA BET ?? no thx

 

[Divak]

How many game creators here would be interested to have an access to a private render farm?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

If I really need it, I know a few I can pay for, but overall my workload does not demand it, but as I build up a collection of higher-end computers, I slowly want to build a private render farm just because it will make good use of my older hardware I am no longer using.

 

[Divak]

I am curious to find out how those people that make HiRes animations are dealing with the rendering. Using their own rigs or renting, or both? I suppose I can approach a few directly to find out.

 

[Andreas Hardcastle]

How many game creators here would be interested to have an access to a private render farm?

It depends on what you actually mean by that. If you are looking for people to start a cloud rendering pool where everyone can make their rig available when not needed and access shared resources for their own rendering, then yeah, that would be intersting and has been on my mind for a while now .

I am curious to find out how those people that make HiRes animations are dealing with the rendering. Using their own rigs or renting, or both? I suppose I can approach a few directly to find out.

It probably depends a lot o wether it's commercial or just for fun rendering. From what I read on forums and reddit, making use of cloud rendering services at least now and then is quite common for professionals who earn a buck with it.

 

[rayminator]

well there not much you can do except for updating your computer or buy a rendering server that will cost roughly about (New) $25,000 and up to $ 150,000 but you have to think about it are you going to continue to make content for the next few years from now

but I would just update your computer I would rather spend $3,000 on computer parts then paying a service or buy a rendering server

say that you stop after 1 year and paying for that service

this is if you are using that service
$300 x 12 = $3,600 you could of saved for a new computer

 

[seamanq]

Ok. So I decided I wanted to try Paperspace, and here are the reasons. Right now I have a pretty fly rig with a 760 GTX card that unfortunately was deprecated a few years ago, so I can't render in GPU any more on my unit. So that means even with a Xeon E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80 GHz running at 3.40 GHz (that's a 16-core cpu), the fastest CPU rendering I can achieve is one render every two hours. That sucks.

Buying any kind of new video card is out of range for me at the moment as well, so that sucks too. So what to do? Enter Paperspace. With Paperspace, you can set up a virtual machine, and they have VMs that can run with dedicated GPUs, staring from about $0.45 per hour to about $1.30 per hour, depending on the GPU.

$0.45/hour will get you a dedicated Quadro M4000 GPU.
$0.51/hour will get you a dedicated Quadro P4000.
$0.78/hour will get you a dedicated Quadro P5000.
$1.10/hour will get you a dedicated Quadro P6000.
$0.56/hour will get you a dedicated Quadro RTX4000.
All of the above specifications come with an 8 CPU base machine (the version down from my Xeon E5), 30GB of RAM, and 50GB SSD storage. The 50GB SSD storage will set you back $5 a month, fixed.

After multiple attempts and fits and starts, here is how you do it.

Set up a Bring Your Own License Windows 10 system. If you use one of their licenses, you will get Windows 10 Server 2019, which will not play nicely (or at all) with the storage solution I have selected. You will need to buy a Windows 10 Pro license, but those are available cheap. I got one for $10

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.

Because I subscribe to Microsoft Office 365, I automatically get 5 users @ 1TB storage each on One Drive. So, if your Daz3D libraries are under 1TB, you can move them to OneDrive as their new home. Then, you go into

Edit -> Preferences -> Content -> Content Directory Manager

This is the default root directory
C:\Users\blah\Documents\DAZ 3D\Studio

But I wanted everything in
D:\Documents\OneDrive\DAZ 3D\Studio

Then you have to point the meta stuff:

Copy this
C:\Users\blah\Documents\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\meta

To here
D:\Documents\OneDrive\DAZ 3D\Studio\My Daz Connect Library\data\cloud\meta

Make sure you move the stuff to whatever relative path you are pointing at.

The benefit of sticking your Daz3D library on OneDrive is you can develop (i.e., posing, setting up shots) on your local machine, then push them over to the Paperspace GPU unit for rendering. I have plans to try Man Friday's

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which can run batches of renders and restart Daz3D in between each one to prevent memory overflows.

This is a work in progress and I will post what happens as I go along. So far, it is not recognizing any of the files on OneDrive, although I can recognize the files on OneDrive from my PC. I will report how it goes as I go along, but I wanted to document what I have found so far.

 

[seamanq]

Ok, so adding to the saga, it took a hella long time for my 250GB of Daz3D library to upload to my OneDrive, but it happened eventually. Once I set up Daz3D on the other side and pointed it to the content, it worked (pretty much). I still have to re-install things from time to time, but it's pretty good about telling me what and when.

For my test render, I took a scene that would easily take me 2 hours on my rig (CPU only due to the lack of support of my GPU any more). I provisioned a VM with a Quadro P5000 GPU. So I finally got one of my renders which I want to use in a game, set it up, and set it to render. Results: 9:30 rendering time. Holy crap. I tried a second, more complex render (2 models) and it rendered in 22 minutes, which is still pretty decent given that it is a pretty complex set with a lot of light bouncing around.

Anyway, if anyone wants to try this, they can use this code for a free $10 credit (I get some credit too for sharing):

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.

It is far from perfect, but if I can work out the kinks, this could be a really good solution for rendering while I am waiting until I can afford new hardware.


Scarlett Interview, 9:30 on the Rackspace VM with P5000 GPU.