Creating with 3d has its perks. The control you have over your scenes is unparalleled by any other medium. You can model and texture your scene exactly as you envisioned it, move a virtual camera around to get the right shot (or sequence of shots), you can set up your lights without worrying about logistical limitations, you can automate almost everything- you can go crazy, basically. Want to make an establishing shot of a sci-fi command center situated on a cliff of an alien planet complete with robotic sentry and spaceships landing on docks? No problem! With a decent computer, the 3d suite of your choice and a honed skill set you could create that in a matter of days or even hours, and you can integrate it into a live action short with some compositing, or use it for your animated film. The possibilities are endless. When you’ve finished your project, and are about to kick off your renders however, things may not fall into place as smoothly.
You may have a computer that can handle the memory overhead of a heavily populated scene for example, but rendering that scene also renders your machine useless for the time it takes to complete a finished frame or sequence of frames. You could pool together several machines and distribute the processing between them, freeing up your main computer for more work while monitoring the renders, but that would cost a sizable amount of money to set up and maintain. You could sign up to a render farm, and pay only as you use its service, which is a more cost efficient solution, but a potentially costly one all the same.
Cloud rendering can seem costly at first glance, and many rendering solutions have rates that are more accessible to studios with budgets than they are to students, individual freelancers, or casual users. This is inevitable for the most part, as employing machines to render projects en masse, and people to oversee the whole process takes money, and the upkeep required to keep a render service from becoming obsolete is quite high. However, we at GarageFarm.NET recognize your needs, and have worked to be one of the most affordable rendering services out there. Whether you’re a professional working within a budget, or an independent creator with limited resources, our rendering solution is designed with you in mind. Here’s how you can maximize your benefits when rendering with us.
Our render farm pricing allows you to manage your expenditures based on three priorities: High, Medium and Low. These priorities allow your project to be rendered by different machines, and determine how many of those machines work on your job. The higher the priority, the better the machines, the more of them your project may use, and the sooner they are allocated to you. Naturally the price per (CPU) hour of rendering increases as you select higher priorities for your render. This system is put into place to allow you to spend only according to what you really need for a particular project. If you have weeks till your deadline for example, and are only rendering a high resolution still, you could submit your job on Low, with up to 10x 64GB RAM machines, which would be more than enough for distributing a single frame. Conversely, if you are in the middle of a rush job with a couple of days till your deadline, using High priority is your best bet, assuring you of a place in the top of the queue, where your job only waits for any other high priority jobs before yours, if it happens to be a busy day at the farm.
A brief summary of the ideal priority to use for a particular situation would be:
High for ASAP deadlines within a few hours
Medium for a deadline in 1 – 2 days
Low for a deadline in 3 or more days
Medium priority is at half the cost of High, and Low is half the cost of Medium, and can also be utilized in the context of the activity on the farm as you submit your job. That means huge potential savings. Use the priority that suits your needs, and try to add a time allowance for the rendering process as much as possible, to anticipate testing, and if need be, troubleshooting.
Because we appreciate your business, we try to find ways to make what you pay for rendering go as far as it can. Our discount scheme adds 4% of what you pay as bonus credits at $250, and starting at $500, increases by 4% for ever addition of $500, so with a payment of $1000, you get 8% or $80 worth of bonus credit totaling your credit to $1080. Note that when your payment reaches a higher range, you get an exponentially higher value for what you initially put in. For instance, a $12,500 payment grants you a 100% bonus (or 50% discount if you count it the other way around). Yes, 100% meaning $25,000 worth of credit at your disposal. In other words, that’s up to 30,000 hours of continuous rendering on powerful E5 V4 machines. Try to wrap your head around that.
If you’re a business with heavy rendering needs, we can discuss terms to offer even higher discounts. Please reach out and we’ll be happy to chat.
New users also get $25 worth of credit as a starting bonus, to try the farm for free. We occasionally provide coupons that allow you to get started with $50 dollars or even more, especially when we launch support for a new program or plugin, so check our webpage and Facebook for updates.
We can confidently say that our support team is unlike any other farm’s. Available 24/7 and consisting of dedicated and friendly 3d generalists, working side by side with our developers, the guys are there to help you with anything from kicking off your first render with us to deep checking any issues with your scene configuration that might get in the way of rendering. They constantly keep track of your jobs, making sure everything runs smoothly, and if there are any hiccups, they check your scene immediately and identify any problems, even making the needed adjustments to your scene and re-submitting the job for you in the event of an emergency. You can voice any concerns you may have and they will gladly attend to them.
3d rendering can generate some hefty overhead, and a reliable but cheap render farm is hard to find. With a little planning ahead and GarageFarm.NET, you can keep costs to a minimum and focus on creating your next big scene!
If you want to learn more about render farms in general, check out our guide: How to use online render farms.