Planetside partners with Pixel Plow as Official Render Farm

Started by Oshyan, August 22, 2014, 05:46:04 PM

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digitalguru

That's good to know.

Project is still a few months away from being ready to render, but will lock it down to v4.2.10.

diverone

If you are new to using Pixel Plow please read this so you don't make the same mistake I did and yes many have made this mistake in fact PP has a page devoted to it - do not become as they put it a, 'statistic'. I signed up and paid the ten bucks then submitted a job - I uploaded the TG 4 scene with files etc. I actually thought the ten bucks was a starting point.  I wanted a single frame rendered. I started then went out for a bit, came back and bam it was at $211.00. Not a single frame rendered yet - 0. I never read about a max budget etc or frames I assumed something and paid the price for that assumption. I contacted Pixel Plow and asked if they could possibly make an exception after all I paid $211.00 without a single delivered frame - nothing. They response:

"We wish we were able to extend more leniency on these sorts of issues, but at the end of the day, we're a business and have operating costs."

Leniency? That's what a prosecutor tells you. They also said that they weren't hiding anything from me, I never said they did. They say this because others have claimed hidden costs, etc.

digitalguru

Diverone:
That's a bit disconcerting considering I'm just considering submitting something to them

QuoteI wanted a single frame rendered
Was it a massive tiled frame? $211.00 for no frame rendered? Did you have a high Power Slider setting?


Oshyan

While this outcome is definitely unfortunate, what happened here is that the user submitted a job at default 5.0 power level, and then did not select a single frame to render, but rather accepted the default frame range of frames 0-100. So PixelPlow started a 100 frame job and thus was consuming resources across 50 or more machines simultaneously, each trying to render its own full image. This is essentially the result of not checking all settings on the submission form before pressing submit, and with money on the line I'm not sure why one would do that.

It's troubling that this may be a common issue with PixelPlow users, but I think if you look at the job submission steps and the settings you have available, you should be able to see that you'd want to change some of those defaults depending on your needs. I do think a "Render Single Tiled Image" checkbox might be a good idea for their submission tool though, but of course people would still have to check that box and not simply accept the defaults.

- Oshyan

raymoh

I agree with Oshyan.
I had to learn this for myself also the "hard (and expensive)" way with my first render submitted to PP. The default presets at Pixel Plow are not adapted well to us "Single Frame-Renderers". Meanwhile to me it's almost instinctive to change the frames to 1:1 and set the slider to "low cost rendering". I have time to wait...
"I consider global warming much less dangerous than global dumbing down"   (Lisa Fitz, German comedian)