Announcing Pixel Plow

[digitalis99]

Hello all,

Sorry for my absence from these forums for the past year.  I miss the great people and great ideas that this forum has...it really isn't common.  I hope we're bringing another great idea to the table.

While away, I was busy following through with my threats to build a better render farm.  On January 1st, we went public beta.  You can read about our service here: http://www.pixelplow.net

We support every aspect of Terragen 2.4 and 2.5 rendering released to date, including but not limited to:

• Handling of GI pre-passes
• Automatic handling of any additional output
• Tiled rendering for still images
• Automatic scene file optimization for our hardware
• Scene file parsing for form auto-completion on the client-side application

Additionally, we have many non-TG-specific features like:

• Fully automated job submission and result delivery in real-time
• Automated email notification on job completion or exception
• Changing job priority level while running
• Cancelling jobs at any point
• Security by default
• NDA by default
• No job time limits
• No job size limits
• ...and lots more

Oh, and we're cheaper than our competition on top of all that.

If you're interested in knowing more, please head over to our site.  Feel free to ask me questions here as well.  We (Eric C., Eric S., Rick, David, Evan, and myself) remain committed to Terragen as a product, and we look forward to working with all of you in the TG community.  I invite you to give us a try.

Render Endlessly,
Ty Christensen
CEO of Pixel Plow

[TheBadger]

This is turning out to be the best christmas season ever.

[Dune]

As a former tester, I can recommend Pixelplow wholeheartedly. Fast and cheap! Good luck, Ty!

[cyphyr]

Great news, looks to be a full and complete service. Any chance of a price calculator? If I have an animation of 600 frames and one frame takes an hour to render on my home PC is their a way I can "guestimate" a rough idea of how much it will cost in total.
Cheers
Richard

[digitalis99]

@TheBadger: Happy New Year!
@Dune: Thanks very much for the plug.  Dune really helped us in testing with some tough scenes.
@cyphyr: We're working on that now, actually.  Unfortunately, it's difficult to have a comparison from your machine to our farm.  I know many render farm services have price calculators, but they are of wildly varying quality and methods.  How would you like to indicate the speed of your computer, a CPU list drop-down, a Cinebench score, or some other metric?

One of the completely unique features we have is a per-job budget.  Our software automatically monitors the job cost during the run, and if at any point we estimate it will exceed your budget, we suspend the job and notify you immediately.  It's pretty darn cool for people that don't want to be surprised by a ridiculous invoice at the end of their render.

[digitalis99]

While we're on the topic of price, I thought it would be interesting to share a tidbit of info regarding how our pricing methodologies stack up against the competition.  A while back, we submitted a test job (tiled still) to our *ahem* competition's farm as well as our own.  We started the timer when the job file was submitted (to rule out upload time as a factor) and stopped it when the results were delivered (our case), or the file was made available for download (their case).  Times are HH:mm:ss and all prices were converted to USD at time of job run.

Competition @lowest priority
Completion in - 6:33:36 (ready for download)
Cost - $260.33

Pixel Plow @low priority
Delivered in - 8:20:28
Cost- $58.14

Pixel Plow @high priority
Delivered in - 3:33:22
Cost- $191.92

Why is Pixel Plow less than 1/4th the price of the competition, you ask?  That's because our competition charges for renting the entire farm for the block of time that your job is running, whereas Pixel Plow only charges for the actual CPU time used to compute your render.  If your render, whether still or animation, would leave one or more nodes of a render farm idle at some point during the job, the competition charges you for use of the idle CPU time even though it's of no benefit to you.  For example, if farm X had 196 nodes, and you sent them a 200 frame animation where each frame took about an hour to render, farm X would render the first 196 frames on their 196 nodes during hour 1 and the last 4 frames on 4 of their nodes during hour 2.  The problem is that they charge for the second hour worth of 192 nodes sitting there doing nothing in addition to the 4 nodes that are doing something useful.

There's a major devil in those details, and that devil has your credit card information.

[Dune]

Speaking about credit cards; my suggestion would be to make available paying through Paypal, perhaps before downloading the render if you want to be sure of payment. I (for one) am not too keen on getting my credit card info out.

[Zairyn Arsyn]

this is great,
ill most likely use this service on my large Terragen animation project.

[rcallicotte]

Would someone give an example of using this service, if you have used it?  If the vendor PixelPlow is reading this, I'm wondering what, for example, a Terragen render of 300 frames of HD would be.

[digitalis99]

Speaking about credit cards; my suggestion would be to make available paying through Paypal, perhaps before downloading the render if you want to be sure of payment. I (for one) am not too keen on getting my credit card info out.

Good suggestion.  We've thought about that before, but it leaves us in a predicament.  On one hand, we can't have reasonable assurances of people paying if we issue invoices after the render job is done instead of charging a card on file.  That's a major problem with a worldwide market and varying collections laws from country to country...not to mention what a tremendous burden it would be to actually perform collections if the situation arose.

On the other hand, we didn't want to have any pre-pay requirements for our customers.  The only way to guarantee payment when PayPal is the method is to take more money from a customer than there job requires before they submit a job.  While some farms do that, we have a bit of an ethical problem with that approach.  It doesn't seem reasonable to either party to require advance payment, since we wouldn't know how much to require, and our customers wouldn't want to pay in advance for something they may not use.

We may implement a pre-pay system in the future if these issues can be dealt with effectively, but for the time being, stored credit cards are the only method we offer.  If it's any comfort, our tech businesses have been storing credit cards safely for over 12 years.  Encrypted browser transfer and encrypted information storage in an off-machine database that does not have public Internet access yields the safest holding by today's standards.

[digitalis99]

Would someone give an example of using this service, if you have used it?  If the vendor PixelPlow is reading this, I'm wondering what, for example, a Terragen render of 300 frames of HD would be.

Price-wise?  If so, that would be entirely dependent on the complexity of the frames, the resolution of the frames, and the number of frames.  If you like, you could PM me an example scene file and I could give you a price estimate.

[rcallicotte]

Thanks.  I'll sure think about it.  Can you take the TG2 format?  If so, I'll look something up.

Would someone give an example of using this service, if you have used it?  If the vendor PixelPlow is reading this, I'm wondering what, for example, a Terragen render of 300 frames of HD would be.

Price-wise?  If so, that would be entirely dependent on the complexity of the frames, the resolution of the frames, and the number of frames.  If you like, you could PM me an example scene file and I could give you a price estimate.

[digitalis99]

Thanks.  I'll sure think about it.  Can you take the TG2 format?  If so, I'll look something up.

Of course, we support Terragen 2.4 and 2.5.

[TheBadger]

@Digitalis99

Some questions for you...

I see from your page that you also support Maya. I know this is the TG2 forum, but is there any difference in how it will work or cost from what you have told us here?

Do I need any software to work with your farm? I did not notice any mention of it on your page, so just wanted to be sure.

Are you licensed in seattle?

I am hopping to have some projects ready to render in the spring early summer, is it a guarantee that you will have the best price? Or is it something that can fluctuate based on some factors?

I really like the sound of what you have been saying, and I like the impression I am getting of what kind of company you are striving for. Hope I will get the chance to render with you soon.

[digitalis99]

@Digitalis99

Some questions for you...

I see from your page that you also support Maya. I know this is the TG2 forum, but is there any difference in how it will work or cost from what you have told us here?

Do I need any software to work with your farm? I did not notice any mention of it on your page, so just wanted to be sure.

Are you licensed in seattle?

I am hopping to have some projects ready to render in the spring early summer, is it a guarantee that you will have the best price? Or is it something that can fluctuate based on some factors?

I really like the sound of what you have been saying, and I like the impression I am getting of what kind of company you are striving for. Hope I will get the chance to render with you soon.

All jobs are submitted through the same GUI that runs on our client's machines.  You basically pick your render app, point to the folder that contains your scene file, select a few items like priority/budget/email address, and click "Submit".  Depending on the app, you may need to prep your scene a bit before submitting it.  At the moment, we only support Maya ASCII files, since we can read them and parse the information into our software easily.  The functions and features between the apps are as identical as the render apps allow.  We support tiled renders in Blender, Maya, Terragen, Lightwave, Modo, and (soon) 3dsmax, for example.

The only pricing differences are all detailed here:
http://www.pixelplow.net/#!/pricing/

Basically, if the render app or engine is licensed in more of a per-node model (like Terragen for example), then we have app or engine-specific fees that are tacked on to our low base rates.  Those apps are detailed there on that page, and any changes will show up on that same page.  The only need for changes would be additions or removals of apps and engines, or if a vendor decides to change their fee structure on us.  Those fees are pass-through licensing straight to the app/engine vendors, so we're just a collector or facilitator of the software rental.  We won't be changing them unless the software vendors require it.  We have no need to change our base rate, because it's already quite low.  This pricing model prevents problems like Blender guys paying for Maya and V-Ray. (!)

Our client-side software is supplied as part of the service, and it does all the heavy lifting.  It's also fully managed, so you don't have to mess with keeping it up to date.  It makes it easy for us to roll out new features seamlessly to our customer base.

The farm is currently located in Washington State, for several strategic reasons.