Ten days. That's right, just 10 more days for us to finish "Frame por Frame", our short animated film. I'll do a complete write out overview about this project, once we deliver it.

Anyway, as we are reaching the deadline, we are rendering a bunch of scenes now. This step is really time-consuming because it's hardware-dependent, and even though we have pretty decent computers, it seems like in the world of 3D, it's never decent enough. That can also be a future post, how inaccessible 3D is compared to 2D. Cool, back to the post.

So, even though we have decent computers, with 39 scenes to render and 10 days to go, time is something we don't have.

Of course, we didn't start rendering Yesterday, we have been rendering a few scenes here and there since 2-weeks ago or so.

Like I mentioned in another post (I think I did, not sure though) we are using V-Ray for Maya to render our project. Even though we have access to V-Ray PLE edition (which is free), we decided to signup for their "normal" educational version. This gives you access to the Chaos Cloud Rendering and includes 10 Chaos Cloud rendering credits, allowing us to delegate some renders to the cloud (be advised: way too many "cloud"s in this post).

Things I like

• Rendering using Chaos Cloud is as easy as clicking some buttons. You open your scene, click on "Submit to Chaos Cloud" button on V-Ray shelf, and follow the steps. If you are using render layers, you can select which layers you want to render. After that, you submit the scene, and it might take some time to process everything and send to the Chaos Cloud, but that's fine, I guess. A browser window will open where you enter your credentials and that's basically it, now you just wait and while you wait you can think about why the heck this bullet point is so damn long.
• You don't have to deal with selecting machines, CPUs, GPU, etc.
• It's actually quite fast.
• If you run out of credit, you don't lose your work. But you need to buy more credits, though.
• It supports render elements.

Things I don't like

• Lack of environmental transparency. Since you don't know which is hardware is being used nor where is the render farmer located.
• Lack of hardware transparency. Since you don't have to select machines, CPUs and whatnot, you also don't know on what hardware your project is rendered. Not that that really matters, but it would be nice to know, to kinda estimate how long it would take to render something.
• It's not cheap.
• It seems impossible to estimate the amount of credits you need.

Pricing

At the time of writing, there's a Black Friday sale goin on, with discounts up to 20%. I'm not sure if this discount also applies to the Educational plan, though.

Educational plan:

• 50 Credits = US $33
• 100 Credits = US $65

Commercial plan:

• 100 Credits = US $100
• There are other options here: https://www.chaos.com/cloud-rendering#pricing

Since you get 10 Credits for free, I guess it's kinda fair this price, not cheap, but fair, especially the Educational Plan.

By the way, this is just the credits' pricing. On top of that, you still need a V-Ray subscription. The "V-Ray Education - Student" edition costs US $149 per year.

Wrapping up

I was curious to see how fast rendering in the cloud would be, which I knew it would be fast, but I wanted to know if it would be faster enough to be worth the price. After some tests, I think it is, but as always in life, it depends.

The lack of overall transparency is a bit of a bummer, at least for me. In some ways, it's like streaming services, which you can't see the whole catalogue of movies and TV series before signing up. I do wish there was some sort of calculator, even though I know things may vary and your render as well, it would be nice to have an estimate beforehand.

About the hardware, on their FAQ (which I didn't read everything) they say:

At the moment we use a wide range of machines from 36 to 96 cores. But we continue to experiment with different configurations so these might change.

I guess it's better than nothing, but what about the GPUs?

Even though it's not cheap, sometimes it's nice to have options. Say you are traveling and you need to render something. Having an option to render on the cloud allows you the freedom to not have to carry with you a huge desktop. Please don't do that. Or do, I don't care, but please don't.