The RANCH supports Terragen 2 and 3!

[TheBadger]

I really hope to be able to make use of this in the near future.

[Oshyan]

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

[RenderFred]

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

[cyphyr]

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

[nico]

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 ?

[RenderFred]

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 

[nico]

who i am is not importen - answere my questions please

[epsilon]

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 ....

[RenderFred]

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.

[ndeewolfwood]

hi , ranch computing

in your user guide i saw : saved frames : TIF only.

.exr in a important feature.

Is it something you can tweak ?

[Oshyan]

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

[RenderFred]

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

[ndeewolfwood]

just a double check.
Thanks for reply.

[RenderFred]

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

[Icegrip]

I can recommend the RanchComputing. Very helpful and fast support!