Planetside Software is excited to be partnered with Pixel Plow as our Official Render Farm. Pixel Plow is a relative newcomer to the render farm business but they bring critical IT-industry experience to the table resulting in increased efficiency and allowing them to dramatically reduce operating costs. As a result they’re able to offer the lowest prices and most advanced platform available in the render farm industry.

Pixel Plow has supported Terragen from day one, first with Terragen 2, and now Terragen 3. They have worked closely with us to support all of Terragen’s features in their advanced, distributed rendering environment. Now high speed render farm services are available at a price everyone can afford, whether you’re rendering high resolution still images or complete animations. And it’s easy to use too. Check out this video we created showing exactly what it’s like to render using Pixel Plow’s dedicated render farm application.

Pixel Plow Features

• Lowest pricing in the industry, starting at 1¢/Ghz-hr
• Clear, up-front pricing structure
• No need to pre-purchase credits, no high cost minimum buy-ins or pre-pay discounts required for best pricing
• No start-up cost
• You are only charged for CPU time used – no “dedicated farm” policy, saving you money (read more here)
• No time limits
• Budgeting feature allows you to set a target cost and automatically avoid overruns (see FAQ for details)
• Dynamic cost estimation for all jobs based on render time of already completed frames
• Dedicated job submission and tracking application, application-agnostic
• Dynamic priority control, change the priority (and pricing) of your job at any time
• Frames are downloaded automatically as they are completed by the farm
• Custom frame render lists, for example render frame 1-10 and 50-100 of a 500 frame animation (great for testing)
• High speed data center means faster bi-directional file transfer speeds
• Encrypted data transfer keeps your proprietary info secure
• Constant improvement, new features, additional application support, etc.

Pixel Plow has a history of customer-friendly improvements to their service. The last time they found a way to save money, they didn’t pocket the change, they passed the savings on to their customers. Time is still money, as they say, but you may be surprised by how little it can cost to get renders done for you at high speed on Pixel Plow’s platform. Maybe we’ll ruin the surprise a little though…

We decided to do an experiment to find out what the lowest render farm pricing means in the real world. We took one of the Terragen 3 example scenes, “Planet with Asteroid Rings” and added a little camera move to animate it. Then we rendered it at 1080p on Pixel Plow. Typical render time for a single frame was about 16 minutes on our test machine here, so it would have taken 1600 minutes, or nearly 27 hours, to complete it. We submitted the project at low priority for maximum savings and got the first frame back a mere 7 minutes later. 8 more followed within 60 seconds. They continued to flow in at a steady pace and we received all 100 frames in about an hour. Quite a time savings for us, but how much did it cost?

$2.92 USD

Less than a latte at Starbucks? That’s pretty awesome. We figured at that rate we might as well do some more! So we put together another shot of 300 frames this time and submitted it again but at High priority – 5 times the cost – just to see how high it would go. It came back to us in about an hour and a half, much less than than 3x the render time due to High priority, and even though it was at a greater cost per Ghz, the total was still very reasonable for 10 seconds of 1080p animation: $54.06.

Here’s the finished animation of 400 frames, rendered on Pixel Plow for less than $60. Had we rendered it all at low priority the cost would have been a very reasonable $14.

The conclusion: rendering animations is finally affordable for everyone, thanks to Pixel Plow!

All this praise may sound a little over-the-top, we’ll admit. But our enthusiasm is genuine. The reality is we’re innovators ourselves, working to tackle big problems in new ways, so we can’t help but appreciate anyone doing things a little differently and excelling as a result. We’re proud to be working with Pixel Plow to bring rendering to the masses.

So what are you waiting for? Get rendering, let’s see your best scene put into motion!

http://www.pixelplow.net/