Planetside partners with Pixel Plow as Official Render Farm

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

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digitalis99

Quote from: edlo on July 11, 2016, 11:10:45 AM
*Update:
I was contacted by support and they have managed to track the issue through their AVS provider down to what seems to be a difference in how Canadian banks report the AVS information; so as soon as I have some time I will try again changing the data and hopefully matching what the bank reports so that the payment can go through. For now it seems Canadian cards have issues going through.
BTW The invoice was deleted to keep the system from retrying automatically.
Thanks to the support person that handled this all the way through.

So I decided to try pixelplow; signed in added my CC and failed, I contacted support and I was told that the address should be exactly the same as the account, so I went into my bank account and copied the address and name exactly as it is. No luck; so then I was told Canadian cards have issues with AVS as they say they provide this feature, yet they dont. I talked to my bank and they do  offer AVS and of course I have used the card elsewhere several times without issue.
Long story short, the invoice was deleted from my account and no further effort to get me up and rendering was done, and no further communication, or help from PP.
You seem to be on top of things so you might be able to help further.
Thanks in advance.

Edlo, sorry I didn't see this sooner.  We've had almost no end of AVS-related problems from customers in Canada and the UK, but it's actually due to their lack of consistency in formatting of their postal codes.  We even wrote up a whole page on the topic:

http://www.pixelplow.net/support/why-did-my-credit-card-payment-fail/

Due to the level of problems Canadian and UK customers were having, we were able to soften the AVS checks that our gateway provider makes.  They recommended against the changes, but they were impeding progress...so we opted for the nuclear option.

Long story cut short, if you never had anything resolved, it is far more likely to work now than it was a few months back.
Pixel Plow :: Render Endlessly :: http://www.pixelplow.net

digitalis99

It's been a while since I posted here, but there have been improvements to our handling of Terragen scene files.  Since the last post:


  • We deployed Terragen 4.0.04 to the farm
  • We now detect the use of Ambient Occlusion in the environment lighting settings, and prevent tile rendering still image jobs if found
  • We now detect enabled 2D Motion Blur and prevent tile rendering still image jobs if found

The last two checks are designed to prevent incorrect still image renders as those features aren't compatible with tile rendering in Terragen.  Thanks to the customers who have helped us work through those issues.  We continue progressing to being as "fire and forget" as possible...at least in support of Terragen.

Of course, our hardware footprint continues to expand to meet the customer demand.
Pixel Plow :: Render Endlessly :: http://www.pixelplow.net

digitalis99

Quite a while since the last post, but here we are again.  In case you all hadn't seen via our social media channels, we updated our TG4 instance to 4.1.11. 

It was fun sharing a booth with Planetside at Siggraph this year.  Lot's of "Terragen still exists?!?!" kind of comments, but it was great to see people light up when they saw movies in which Terragen was used.  I don't know about you, but we still think Terragen is the best outdoor modelling/rendering application.
Pixel Plow :: Render Endlessly :: http://www.pixelplow.net

Dune


Oshyan

Yes, it was a great experience sharing a booth with Pixel Plow, and meeting Terragen enthusiasts old and new. And Pixel Plow generously donated a Terragen 4 Professional license for us to gift to a lucky SIGGRAPH attendee. We're tallying our opinions on who the lucky winner will be, announcement soon (so yes, there are sometimes other benefits to coming to SIGGRAPH besides just getting to meet us. :D).

- Oshyan

digitalis99

In case you guys hadn't already seen it, our TG4 instances are all running 4.1.14 as of a few days ago.
Pixel Plow :: Render Endlessly :: http://www.pixelplow.net

digitalis99

4.1.18 was just rolled out to our "Terragen 4" instance selection.
Pixel Plow :: Render Endlessly :: http://www.pixelplow.net

digitalguru

Hello digitalis99

Looking at your service to render an animation, but have a master scene created in Terragen 4.2 (4.2.08.1) would that work on your farm? This is a question to yourself and Matt I guess as to if that is backwards compatable.

Also using Daniis Classic Erosion v1_0_6 and see you list Dkerosionclassic 0.8.10 - that would be more of an issue - might have to edit the scene to be compatible with your versions, but obviously would save a lot of work if you intend to update in the future

Thanks

Graham

Oshyan

4.2 should be supported through the Alpha option for Terragen in the client uploader, at the least. Not sure about the erosion plugin. But digitalis (aka Ty) may be willing to update the plugin if he has access/licensing. Best to contact them directly via email as I don't know if he monitors the forum here consistently.

- Oshyan

digitalguru

Thanks Oyshan, early days yet - project is a couple of months away from completion, but that time my versions will probably be out of date :-)

I'll lock my versions now though and hopefully the updates will catch up.


Matt

If you only use features that were in the older version, usually it should render just fine and simply warn about unknown parameters in the scene file. I try to maintain both forward and backward compatibility as much as possible, because we want you to be using the latest versions without fear of this kind of problem. However, we don't have control over 3rd party plugins.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

digitalguru

Good to know - the scene was created in 4.1 so hopefully will be ok then, the only wildcard might be the classic erosion plugin, but Danii might be on the case there.

digitalguru

Actually, now that path tracing is tantalizingly looming on the horizon, I might wait to see if I can use it for this animation :-)

Oshyan

Keep in mind the Path Tracer will likely be slower to render. If you have the render budget it should look great, especially for certain situations with trickier lighting. But it may not be ideal for everything, at least until further optimized.

- Oshyan

digitalis99

Hey all!  Sorry for my absence.  Matt is correct in that I don't necessarily monitor this forum.

In case all you TG fans hadn't noticed, we have support for TG 4.2.10 and the latest Frontier build (under our "Alpha" heading) on the farm.  Daniil's plugs are deployed as well, but there may be some technical issues that remain to be worked through with licensing that software on our farm.  We'll get it handled, if it doesn't work already.  Let us know if you encounter issues.

Thanks!
Pixel Plow :: Render Endlessly :: http://www.pixelplow.net