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RenderFlow Renderfarm offers Cycles GPU Rendering

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RenderFlow are ramping up to offer GPU-accelerated Cycles rendering. While in beta, they're offering free rendering!

Gerhard Kalt writes:

We are proud to announce that RenderFlow offers now GPU render service for Cycles from Blender version 2.63a. This service is in free public beta and we would like to invite you and test it at www.renderflow.com - we offer a free of charge, no limit, demo account where you can test all our features. For private render jobs you can register and enjoy our full support service. We also offer service on CPU which allows bigger scene size. Our biggest nodes are equipped with 64 cores and 128 GB of RAM.

We offer online render service with Internal and Cycles which can be fully integrated in your Blender workflow via our plugin (add-on) which allows automatic upload of scene and assets. On our HTML5 based Control Console you can, then, supervise your results from any device (PC, tablet, smartphone) with internet access and installed browser. No Apps needed for Smartphones, save your memory for more important things.

This video shows the whole process including register+upload+render+download of a test scene. And it only takes 3 min.

For questions or suggestions don´t hesitate in contacting us under: [email protected].

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

64 Comments

      •  I will ;-) I had bad experiance with CoreFarm.com. It didn't work with large scenes, I was in contact with the founder but there were to many basics that didn't work for a usably and economic workflow.

        You have to do it better ! ;-)

          • Rodrigo Medinilla from renderflow said this in a mail to me:

            The cards are tesla M2090. Although the theoretical limit of 5Gb memory is not advisable to pass the 2Gb.

          •  Hi Alain. The RAM limit for stable processing in our GPUs is 2GB and for our biggest CPU nodes it would be in 64 GB.

          • My second test worked ;-)
            First test did not work because all textures were packed into the Blendfile and everything rendered without textures. You have to modify the Blenderplugin that it checks before uploading if textures are not packed into the blendfile.

  1. Frank Baylor on

    Hi,
    is it just me, or is your register form currently broken?
    After sending the form i get an error, stating that the token in the form is missing.

  2. Frank Baylor on

    weird. still getting the same error. i cleared my cache and even deleted the cookies from your site before retrying.
    Still getting:  "sr_feuser_register: The form's token is empty!"

  3. Hi, I'm happy you are including Cycles rendering in your catalogue.  One question, the costs per frame specified in the budget tool, are they calculated based on CPU use only or do they also apply to GPU rendering?

    • Hi Luis. By now the cost estimator is still based in CPU. As render on GPU is less costly the rates will be more economic as well. We have not yet established the pricing scheme but we are sure that it will surprise many of our clients positively. 

    • Hi Reezjer. First of all please check whether you have Java installed on your computer. You can send a description of your incident to [email protected] - specify what system you use (OS, Browser, ..) and attach a screenshot of the problem if possible. Thank you.

      • Sure, jave is installed, it was on XP 64,Firefox, Blender 2.63. I tried it on another pc (Windows 7 64bit, didn't work either. Still there was an issue with the web installer, figured it would be because there where more then 1 folder under .../Program Files/Blender Foundation/ (2.60,2.61,...) so deleting them cleared this issue (you should fix that in your installer). Manually installed the script, it works. Uploaded a blend file to a personal account, it's still on queue. Even don't get an estimation on the price, 1 frame, after more then 5 minutes. Still on queue, it also doesn't give an estimation on how long the render will be on queue ...

        • Ok, almost 4 hours later; I log in again and is says, "finalized", but when I download the result, only 1/4 of the image is rendered, the rest is black ...rendertime 7.54m, while my laptop runs the whole image in 2m more while internetting and so. So I do not hope the rendertime of the whole image is x4 on RenderFlow.

          • Hello Reezjer. We allow us to your post for a general declaration because it might also anwer your questions.

            Dear Betatester

            The tremendous demand of render tests exceeded all our expectations. We allow us to explain that, as we are in Beta testing phase, we do not have all our GPU nodes active. We also incorporated our 64 core nodes for comparative testing CPU-GPU. This caused that some frames take more time in processing.We want to thank everybody for feedback and support requests because they allow us to improve our service. We hope that you understand that, due to this overwhelming interest, our time of response will be a bit longer than usual. All support requests are registered in our ticketing system and will be attended as soon as possible.We are sorry for the inconvenience and allow us to mention that this Beta testing phase will take some more time which gives you the opportunity to make more test while we integrate new features and improve our service. Thank you for your understanding,The RenderFlow Team

  4. 1. The instalation should be possible in Mac. You only have to select the folder where Blender lies.2. You must make sure that you have Java installed on the computer and in your Browser.

    • Frank Baylor on

      there are indeed some things to improve.
      1. you can't just select the folder. You have to select the executable.
      2. it automatically installs into the first blender folder it finds. if you have multiple folder like 2.62, 2.63 etc. you should be able to choose to which blenderversion to install.

      Oh and by the way. The installer doesn't seem to work with openjdk. i had to manually install sun's jdk. That's not a problem, but it would be nice, if future versions could support openjdk as many linux distros are dropping the support for Sun/Oracle due to license problems.

      But other than that, it's just what i was searching for.
      An affordable renderfarm, working under linux, easily payable by paypal, and a super simple integration into blender.
      Thanks a lot for that.

    • Yes, I understand. Everything would have worked, but you don't have direct link to addon.. and that is a problem for mac, because there is no exe file to select..  if I select blender.app it shows button "open" and it just opens it like a folder.. so I cannot dowload and install it in right place.

      • Hi Karlis. Thank you for your feedback. We are already having a look at your problem and we try to solve it as soon as possible. Could you please send the incident also to [email protected] - this way it enters in our ticketing system which guarantees you better follow up support. Thank you. We keep you informed.

    • John Cardozo on

      Hello, I'm using Mac osx and I tried typing the folder path ( /Applications/blender ) in order to install the plugin, I moved Blender to some other locations in my hard disk but it was impossible to install the plugin for Blender. Is there any page, video or document where you explain the process to install the plugin in Mac osx? thank you very much.

      • John Cardozo on

        Thanks to the RenderFlow support I could make it work. The solution is to point the plugin to blender.app/Contents/MacOS/. Thanks a lot.

  5. Hello;
    I watched you video and it looks pretty simple. I already register and I want to render 1000 frames Animation. ( Blender Internal), so my question is I do not see an option to keep my .blend file private or even delete it from your server, I do not mind to pay for this render but I must make sure the .blend file won't be released to anyone.  Is there a secure and clear way to do this?

    • Hi Harris. If you registered and you created a personal account then your render jobs are private and underlie our NDA.
      Concerning deleting the project from our servers you have to enter the webconsole with your credentials, open the detail view of the project by clicking somewhere on the project name or the preview window. There you find the "Delete" Button with which you can delete your project. Hope to have answered your questions.

      • NDA? does it stand for?  also:
        ------ If you registered and you created a personal Account------ Are there other type of accounts? It just asked me for an email and password !

        • Also one problem I see with this FREE  CYCLE TESTS is the time. I submitted a TEST file of few frames an hour ago and I am still on "QUEUE".....Cycles could be very tricky people could be submitting jobs for free with 3000 cycles passes !

          • First of all we are sorry for the inconvenience. 
            We allow us to take your post to explain another detail which we experienced and which slows down the tests. Please be aware that Blender has the active time range set to 1-250 by default which means that for rendering 1 still image lots of users send 250 times the same image till they find out and pause or stop. So please make sure that you set the time range correct - for 1 frame render, set it to 1 and for animations set it to 1-xxx (your desired frame number)

        • Hi Harris. NDA means Confidentiality Clause. We offer two account types. 1) The free demo account which is accessable to anybody and it is public (just enter the service with user: [email protected] password: demo) and 2) The private account. For the second one press "Register" and register with your personal data. After confirming your account follow the plugin install instrucccions and you can start to render. In the process intervene only you and the server. Whenever you want, you can delete your project from the detail view of your project which you get by clicking on the project name in your webconsole view and all your archives will be deleted from our system.

          • Thanks for your answers, yes I did create a personal account and I confirmed it by the email you sent. ( Didn't know we could use demo-renderflow  to have access to Free tests).

            Yes I know many submit 1-250 frames to render just one still. No I set it correctly, it probably hasn't started yet because I haven't put any money yet, so it is still on QUEUE I guess. That was my confusion between pay accounts and FREE accounts.

            Anyways thanks for replying very helpful.

    • We wanted to add a more detailed answer to your request. For best performance on our farm please keep in mind the following configuration: 1) In "Performance" do not set the number of threads, so you can also be processed by our biggest nodes. 2) Configure the tiles 16x16 as a minimum to optimize the processing of all cores.

  6. Just a suggestion. You could also make two buttons in your plugin. "Render Still" and "Render Animation" Just to not accidentally have those 250 frames rendered by one person if they only wanted one. Some tooltips could also be nice, "Set up your render settings in the "Render" tab before sending the project." or something... Just some ideas. :)

  7. Hi its working very well,but i didnt try image textures based materilas and particles,are you shure that is not working ?Even when you bake that particles and pack them in to the blend file?...i would like to know,if i will able to afford this service later, i dont understand the budget calc :D 

    •  Hello autotronik. Thank you for the idea with particles. We took note and we will test it. Concerning the cost estimator: First of all it is set up for CPU - the pricing for GPU is not out yet. It is basically a comparation between the specs of your local machine vs. our service - INPUT: Data from your machine which is Nº of cores of your machine + Nº of frames you want to render + Render time of average frame on your local machine -- OUTPUT: two options: 1) Best price (cheapest but low priority) 2) Best time (more expensive as high priority) -- We employ a pay-per-use system which means that we do not charge for upload/download or preparing the scene. We charge from the moment on that render starts and we charge you the GHz consumption of your job at a rate of 0.04-0.06 Euro/GHz/hour --- ANYWAY - our recommendation is to make some test render to see how we work and what an average frame might cost you (you can also check rendered projects at our demo account for comparison). For bigger projects it is always a good idea to contact the renderfarm by mail for a cost estimation. This way many more details can be taken into account and the estimation gets more accurate. It became quite a long answer, so we hope it answers your questions.

      • ok i already tested your service but console didnt display the price ,ive been using this http://www.renderweb.org/ this is only blender internal render farm but textures and particles was working there,so i think if the users  will pack all the things into .blend file should it work also ... should i try it ?

        • I might be wrong, but Blenderflow is more oriented to serious and commercial work, this renderweb says:
          ""Once the
          projects are rendered, the animations are available for the entire community to
          watch and tag""
          Come on man !

          • renderweb.org seems to be for kids ;-)
            Why to share on Facebook ? Whatch at the shares of Facebook and you see how stupid and useless this "Facebook-Mania" is ;-)

            I will do some more tests with RenderFlow because it just works (until now) ;-)

  8. guys i never said that renderweb is good,i was talking about it only becouse of particels....

    and finnaly my theory was  right renderflow can render particles,but you need to pack that bake in to the .blend file :)

    • That's okay you bring this up if this is what you like.
       However everyone reading this must understand that renderweb is a render network !  Your renders are created by  volunteers from FACEBOOK and they can see your renders etc......So the point is: You need to compare apples with apples !

      RENDERFLOW is a profesional Render FARM using their OWN computers and respecting the PRIVACY of your renders and files.

      • yes is different,but at renderweb you can render private also... main difference is that how it works as you said 
        render web is a web where users share their HOME  computers. So the  its much more slower ,but its free 

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