Hi everyone,
I am glad to announce that the RANCH will be soon (when Terragen 2.4 is released) offering a high performance rendering service for Terragen users. For those not familiar with the concept, it is quite simple: you upload your Terragen project, and we render it for you, much faster than you can do on any single system. Our prices are the best you can find among big rendering facilities, and we will do our best to provide a great service for Terragen, as we do for all software we support.
We have been working for months now with the Planetside team to adapt Terragen 2.4 to our pipeline (we develop all our software ourselves) and I believe you will be impressed with the results. I will be happy to answer all your questions in this sticky thread but first, I recommend you read our PDF manuals, that is the RANCH General Guide (http://www.ranchcomputing.com/pdf/RUG_General_en.pdf) and our Terragen-specific Guide (http://www.ranchcomputing.com/pdf/RUG_Terragen_en.pdf). Most questions you can have will find their answers in them.
As you probably know, the Garden animation was rendered on the RANCH, but I have also spent a lot of time to ensure that we could also render still images with a very good performance. The introduction of the GI cache functions in 2.4 was essential, as it lets all the render nodes use the same GI solution, thus avoid typical lighting problems associated with GI on a network.
If you have used other rendering facilities before, you will find that the RANCH works differently than most. There is no time sharing on the RANCH, all the power is put to good use on every project. So the performance is the same, every time. For instance each Terragen still image is rendered on a grid of 176 nodes (currently up to 80 megapixels stills).
I hope that our service will give a new dimension to your projects and help Terragen gain new markets (particularly in animation)! ;D
Cheers,
Fred
UPDATE: the RANCH is now supporting both Terragen 2.x and 3.x
That sounds very good, Fred (is this your name?).
Do you have any info on still render pricing yet?
Regards,
Frank
Hi Frank,
Pricing will be the same as for the other software we support (from 2.5 to 5.9 €-cent per GHz-Hour + discounts for quantities). And yes my first name is Frederic :)
Thanks Frederic. Can you help with an example? Let's say an image takes 10 hours to render on my i7 920, how fast would it be on your farm and how much would I pay?
Thanks,
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on March 28, 2012, 05:42:45 AM
Thanks Frederic. Can you help with an example? Let's say an image takes 10 hours to render on my i7 920, how fast would it be on your farm and how much would I pay?
Thanks,
Frank
It's a question that a lot of people may have, so I will give a detailed answer here. For animations, computing an estimation of cost and render time is relatively easy if you know the number of frames and the average render time per frame on your system. For still images, it's not possible to do so because it depends on the repartition of the complexity in the scene, and this varies with each scene. On the RANCH a still image will be split into many regions (176, so one region per RANCH Runner node). So lets' take an example.
Imagine that your image is 4000 x 3000. It means that each node of the RANCH Runner will compute a region of approximately 364 x 188 pixels (4000/11 x 3000/16 as the grid is 11 x 16 = 176). Now let's consider the best case scenario: the image is completely homogeneous, that is, all the regions take the same time to render, let's say 10 minutes: in that case the RANCH will take 10 minutes to render all the regions. So the total processing time will be 10 minutes + the time needed to recombine all the regions into the final image (which can take 1 to 5 minutes). Let's say 15 minutes for the entire project, that would be around 33 euros with the Sapphire formula.
Of course the "completely homogeneous" case is hypothetical; there are always regions which take longer to render than others. In that case the total render time will be the render time of the longest region. In a worst case scenario imagine that the longest region takes 2 hours to render: then the total render time will be 2 hours, and that would be around 265 euros with the Sapphire formula. So it really depends on how complexity is distributed in your scene, and we have no way to know that beforehand. We could subdivide into more regions of smaller size, but in that case it would be even more difficult to predict. With more than 176 regions, each node would have to compute several regions, and for each the populator time would have to be added (and that can add a significant overhead, independant of the definition, on complex scenes). With 176 regions we know that it is done in one pass, and the preparation/populator time has to be done only once per node.
To give you an idea of a typical project, during our tests, a 12000 x 6750 image of the St Helens scene which takes 145 hours on a Core i7-920 and almost 73 hours on a Core i7-2600K overclocked to 4.6 GHz has been rendered in 53 minutes on the RANCH Runner. A 8000 x 4500 version of the same image is done in 30 minutes. As a general rule performance will always be better in animation than on still images (on the Garden scene the RANCH Runner was 250 to 300 times faster than a Core i7-920 :)
Thank you for the comprehensive explanation, Frederic. That was very interesting, and I understand the cost model much better not
I still have trouble to understand the GHz-hour, though, as a measure for forecasting the cost.
So what I understand is that when the ranch is used for 15 minutes, it approximately achieves so much and costs x Euro for that time. In your example, the 4000px render would cost 2.2 Euro per minute, and it is capable of finishing the job in 15 minutes. (I understand that this will vary depending on the scene and that the example is based on the assumption of a homogenous scene with all crops rendering at the same speed).
Do you actually charge the idle nodes? Let's say there is this one bucket that's taking forever, while all other buckets on the other nodes have already finished rendering?
Cheers,
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on March 28, 2012, 06:35:33 AM
Do you actually charge the idle nodes? Let's say there is this one bucket that's taking forever, while all other buckets on the other nodes have already finished rendering?
Cheers,
Frank
Yes but they are not idle, as soon as a node has finished its job it works on another region which has not yet been rendered. That way, if a node crashes for whatever reason the render will still finish as another node will have done the job in its place. It's a necessary safety mechanism which guarantees that the render will finish and not be stuck forever in case of a problem.
Congrats Frederic! Looks like it could be affordable in very long stills too probably.
'File / Export Gathered Project...' this will come handy to me. I sometimes loose the amount and whereabout of used files . Good for archiving :)
The cache settings will hopefully bring an end to some long standing animation and panorama user feature requests and it looks like from the image in the pdf above for stills like this too (i hope) :
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=14225.0
Where is the link for 2.4 , Planetside ? :D
Edit: Frederic i read the other pdf. Obviously TG2 isn't there yet. But the "rendering time limit per project" looks like could be a problem especially for high res animations made with TG2. Will you change it for Tg2?
Quote from: Kadri on March 28, 2012, 11:31:05 AM
Edit: Frederic i read the other pdf. Obviously TG2 isn't there yet. But the "rendering time limit per project" looks like could be a problem especially for high res animations made with TG2. Will you change it for Tg2?
No I don't think we will change it. As all the power is dedicated to each project (no sharing on the RANCH) 3 hours on the RANCH Runner is equivalent to weeks of rendering on a single machine. If the project is really too long then it should be easy to split it into several projects (we did this for the Garden animation). And for frames longer than 3 hours each then there is the Elite formula which has a 6 hours time limit. We sincerely hope that HD frames which take more than 3 hours each on a Dual Xeon node are an exception rather than the norm with TG2 ;)
Thanks :)
Hey, this sounds cool.
Quote from: RenderFred on March 28, 2012, 05:36:13 AM
Hi Frank,
Pricing will be the same as for the other software we support (from 2.5 to 5.9 €-cent per GHz-Hour + discounts for quantities). And yes my first name is Frederic :)
ok but help me out here, is it Ghz hour per core or per physical CPU? Lets say I have a render that takes 20 hours for 200 frames on a 6 core i980 i7 3.3 Ghz. How much do I pay at the ranch and how long will it take?
Quote from: coremelt on March 29, 2012, 06:20:45 AM
Quote from: RenderFred on March 28, 2012, 05:36:13 AM
Hi Frank,
Pricing will be the same as for the other software we support (from 2.5 to 5.9 €-cent per GHz-Hour + discounts for quantities). And yes my first name is Frederic :)
ok but help me out here, is it Ghz hour per core or per physical CPU? Lets say I have a render that takes 20 hours for 200 frames on a 6 core i980 i7 3.3 Ghz. How much do I pay at the ranch and how long will it take?
It is GHz per physical core (we do not charge for hyperthreading like some renderfarms do to artificially rise their prices). So for us, a Dual Xeon E5645 is a 12-core node (even though it is a 24-thread system). We will have an online cost estimator for animations which will tell you that the animation you give as an example (6 minutes per frame on average on a Core i7-980) should be done in around 10 minutes on the RANCH (if your scene use 100% cpu on a Dual Xeon system while rendering). So it is around 20 to 50 euros depending on the priority level you choose.
ok wow, at those prices you'll be hearing from me sometime next week ;)
I've got the TG 2.4 beta and the project is already setup with that.
coremelt, please let us know the details, if you do this. We're eagerly awaiting 2.4.
Quote from: coremelt on March 29, 2012, 06:39:03 AM
ok wow, at those prices you'll be hearing from me sometime next week ;)
I've got the TG 2.4 beta and the project is already setup with that.
I really hope to be able to make use of this in the near future.
Thanks Fred for making this post and answering everyone's questions!
We're really excited to work with RANCH Computing on this service. They have done a tremendous amount of research and development with us to make sure that things work well for both animations and stills, and even while we have been developing things, they have been expanding capacity of the farm. It is now, I would estimate, nearly 50% faster than when we first began discussions. So they are serious about expanding capacity, about providing the best price/performance around, and they are really dedicated to making sure that rendering with each application they support works as well as possible.
I can't wait to see what people are able to do once we are able to make this fully available! (very soon)
- Oshyan
So we are now officially opened! You can't send projects until 2.4 is officially out (which should be very soon), but you can already browse through the site, read the PDF manuals which have been recently updated, etc.
Fred
So I calculate (using your online estimator) that a 900 frame animation (36 sec @ 25fps) where each frame comes in at 1 hour will render in about 3h 45m and cost about 465 Euros. Not too shabby and if a client was footing the bill it should be well within budget for most projects. Well done and about time :)
Cheers
Richard
Quote from: RenderFred on March 28, 2012, 06:42:48 AM
Quote from: FrankB on March 28, 2012, 06:35:33 AM
Do you actually charge the idle nodes? Let's say there is this one bucket that's taking forever, while all other buckets on the other nodes have already finished rendering?
Cheers,
Frank
Yes but they are not idle, as soon as a node has finished its job it works on another region which has not yet been rendered. That way, if a node crashes for whatever reason the render will still finish as another node will have done the job in its place. It's a necessary safety mechanism which guarantees that the render will finish and not be stuck forever in case of a problem.
i am not clear about that - you let us pay your idle nodes ?
you say "" Imagine that your image is 4000 x 3000. It means that each node of the RANCH Runner will compute a region of approximately 364 x 188 pixels (4000/11 x 3000/16 as the grid is 11 x 16 = 176). Now let's consider the best case scenario: the image is completely homogeneous, that is, all the regions take the same time to render, let's say 10 minutes: in that case the RANCH will take 10 minutes to render all the regions. So the total processing time will be 10 minutes + the time needed to recombine all the regions into the final image (which can take 1 to 5 minutes). Let's say 15 minutes for the entire project, that would be around 33 euros with the Sapphire formula.
Of course the "completely homogeneous" case is hypothetical; there are always regions which take longer to render than others. In that case the total render time will be the render time of the longest region. In a worst case scenario imagine that the longest region takes 2 hours to render: then the total render time will be 2 hours, and that would be around 265 euros with the Sapphire formula.
so if one of my "176 grid regions" render 2 hour but all other 175 regions just 10minutes i pay all your pc for 2 hour ?
thats realy unfair !
edit :
playing with your costs calculator
animation of 80 image are 34 euro
a text message tell me 176 images have the same price
ok i input 177 images and price is 68 euro
i pay doubble for one image more ?
Quote from: nico on April 06, 2012, 08:52:21 AM
Quote from: RenderFred on March 28, 2012, 06:42:48 AM
Quote from: FrankB on March 28, 2012, 06:35:33 AM
Do you actually charge the idle nodes? Let's say there is this one bucket that's taking forever, while all other buckets on the other nodes have already finished rendering?
Cheers,
Frank
Yes but they are not idle, as soon as a node has finished its job it works on another region which has not yet been rendered. That way, if a node crashes for whatever reason the render will still finish as another node will have done the job in its place. It's a necessary safety mechanism which guarantees that the render will finish and not be stuck forever in case of a problem.
i am not clear about that - you let us pay your idle nodes ?
you say "" Imagine that your image is 4000 x 3000. It means that each node of the RANCH Runner will compute a region of approximately 364 x 188 pixels (4000/11 x 3000/16 as the grid is 11 x 16 = 176). Now let's consider the best case scenario: the image is completely homogeneous, that is, all the regions take the same time to render, let's say 10 minutes: in that case the RANCH will take 10 minutes to render all the regions. So the total processing time will be 10 minutes + the time needed to recombine all the regions into the final image (which can take 1 to 5 minutes). Let's say 15 minutes for the entire project, that would be around 33 euros with the Sapphire formula.
Of course the "completely homogeneous" case is hypothetical; there are always regions which take longer to render than others. In that case the total render time will be the render time of the longest region. In a worst case scenario imagine that the longest region takes 2 hours to render: then the total render time will be 2 hours, and that would be around 265 euros with the Sapphire formula.
so if one of my "176 grid regions" render 2 hour but all other 175 regions just 10minutes i pay all your pc for 2 hour ?
thats realy unfair !
edit :
playing with your costs calculator
animation of 80 image are 34 euro
a text message tell me 176 images have the same price
ok i input 177 images and price is 68 euro
i pay doubble for one image more ?
Come on, "Nico" (just registered heh?) We know who you are ;)
who i am is not importen - answere my questions please
Quote from: RenderFred on March 28, 2012, 03:06:45 AM
I am glad to announce that the RANCH will be soon (when Terragen 2.4 is released) offering a high performance rendering service for Terragen users.
This sounds very, very interesting ! It's great to see such a high performance/high quality service could be offerd at such affordable prices :)
Could you give an estimate of how long a job will be waiting on average in the queue before it gets started (for both high and low prioroty jobs respectively) ?
As I understood there is no time sharing among jobs, so the average waiting time would be an intersting information to know before submitting a job ....
Quote from: epsilon on April 18, 2012, 03:36:28 PM
Quote from: RenderFred on March 28, 2012, 03:06:45 AM
I am glad to announce that the RANCH will be soon (when Terragen 2.4 is released) offering a high performance rendering service for Terragen users.
This sounds very, very interesting ! It's great to see such a high performance/high quality service could be offerd at such affordable prices :)
Could you give an estimate of how long a job will be waiting on average in the queue before it gets started (for both high and low prioroty jobs respectively) ?
As I understood there is no time sharing among jobs, so the average waiting time would be an intersting information to know before submitting a job ....
Hi epsilon,
it's hard to say, for instance today we had one of our first Terragen projects and the waiting time was not long (maybe one hour at Sapphire priority). However when there is a high traffic it can be much longer (our record is several days, but it is very rare). Anyway you can take a look at the waiting list at any moment and rise your priority if you are in a hurry. The Sapphire priority is generally used by people who planify their renders several days in advance, or who use the RANCH regularly in their workflow and are not facing deadlines for yesterday :) People who _are_ facing tight deadlines generally use higher priorities (but then again, it is not always necessary). The priority system allows for maximum flexibility. Plus, if you have a project which is quick to render, it is always best to choose a higher priority. For instance 15 minutes at Sapphire costs around 33 euros, and around 43 euros in Emerald. Not much difference but your project can be processed several hours earlier if you put it in Emerald when there are a lot of Sapphire projects already in the list.
hi , ranch computing
in your user guide i saw : saved frames : TIF only.
.exr in a important feature.
Is it something you can tweak ?
I believe it is TIF only for tiled rendering of very high resolution images. Sequence renders should be available as EXR. Hopefully RANCH will confirm.
- Oshyan
Yes, as Oshyan said this is only for distributed high resolution stills. For animations you can choose EXR without problem. Is this text (page 3 of the guide) not clear enough?
For image output, never specify a video format (mov, avi, mpg...) as they are not
supported on the RANCH. Always specify individual animation frames rendering with
a standard bitmap format, like TIF or EXR. Please note that high resolution still
images (single frame projects) are always generated as TIF files
just a double check.
Thanks for reply.
Hi,
I am pleased to announce that we now support EXR for distributed still renders (so you can now choose BMP, TIF, EXR or SGI). You can read details about how we render Terragen stills in Appendix B of our PDF guide.
Fred
I can recommend the RanchComputing. Very helpful and fast support! :)
Hi everyone,
just to announce that we have updated the RANCH with version 2.5.4.
Cheers
Fred
I'd like to announce that the RANCH is now supporting the 'sparse cache' technique for rendering animations with Global Illumination (GI). All the gory details are in our PDF guide for Terragen users (pages 7-8), but basically you can now render every nth GI cache file on the RANCH (instead of one per frame) during the GI cache generation project. These will then be used by the rendering project(s); each rendered frame will use an interpolation between several GI 'sparse-cache' files, which will give you the best image quality.
If you intend to render animations with GI on the RANCH, our prepass/rendering method gives you the following advantages:
- you don't have to render the GI cache files yourself (and it will be faster on the RANCH)
- you don't have to upload GI cache files to the RANCH (as they can be huge)
- you can reuse the cache files in several renders (for instance when you split a big project into several small ones)
Cheers
Fred
Most excellent, this is a great feature to have. Glad to see you continue to add support for more TG features. :)
- Oshyan
Hi everyone,
just to announce that we are now running with 2.5.5.0 :)
Cheers
Fred
Hello everyone,
as you probably know we have been supporting Terragen 3 from day one, and we are offering a 100 Euro render credit to every Terragen 3 buyer!
I am also glad to announce that all our rendering servers are now equipped with 48 GB RAM. It can come in handy for heavy projects...
Cheers,
Fred
The RANCH renderfarm
(http://"http://www.ranchcomputing.com")
Hello,
just to announce that we are now running with 3.1.02.0.
Cheers,
Fred
Hello everyone,
I am glad to announce that the new RANCH (http://www.ranchcomputing.com/en/) is now up and running!
- the RANCH Runner is now 2 to 3 times as fast with at least 450 render nodes per project
- a brand new web site, better-looking, more modern and easier to navigate
- no more time limits, and as always the full power behind each project
- last but not least, very affordable prices!
And we still offer 50 euros render credits to new users...
Cheers,
Fred
Thanks for the update Fred :)
I hope to use your service somewhere this year!
Cheers,
Martin
Hi everyone,
I am glad to announce that from October 1 to October 31, the RANCH is even more affordable!
Prices have been dropped from 1.5 cent to 0.9 cent per GHz-H (-40%!) on the Sapphire formula! Higher priority formulas like Emerald (from 2.0 to 1.4 cent, -30%) and Ruby (2.5 to 1.9 cent, -24%) are also cheaper in october... don't miss this opportunity!
If you never rendered Terragen projects on a 1000-Xeon cpu system, now seems like a good time to try...
Fred
Hi,
I am glad to announce that we are now running with Terragen 3.2. We also have a lot of news on the ergonomics side that you may find interesting in our latest newsletter (http://static.ranchcomputing.com/newsletter/2014_11_26_n22/en.html).
Cheers,
Fred