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This cost
estimator is designed to help you estimate the cost of a
project, nothing more.
The real cost of a project will be solely determined by
its total render time: it can be greater or lower than the
estimation.
The total processing time of a Vue project is greater than
the render time. It includes:
- The setup time (FREE) correspond to the
time it takes to send the whole project (scenes + textures)
to all the nodes across the network.
- The render time itself: this is what
you pay for.
- The recombining process
(FREE). At the end of any still image network render, Vue reconstitutes
the final image from hundreds of tiles. Generally it takes a
few minutes.
- The compression process (FREE - to save
you download time) which takes a few seconds to a few minutes
for stills, and typically a few minutes also for small animations.
For a 3600 frames sequence at 720 x 480 (3.3 GB of data)
it takes around 20 minutes.
When you use the cost estimator below, the computed time
and cost correspond to the render time itself. The time
taken by the other processes vary with the file format chosen,
the X / Y resolution and the number of frames to process
(or the number of tiles to recombine for a still image render).
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First,
enter the VueMark7 result of your hardware in the
VueMark7 field (the previous VueMark for Vue 6 is NOT comparable and thus not usable with this cost estimator). To calculate your VueMark7, run the
benchmarks described in the RANCH
Renderfarm User Guide.
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In the following fields, enter an
estimation of the average time per frame on your hardware,
and the number of frames of your animation. If your
project is a still image, the number of frames is
equal to 1, and you can enter a plausible estimation
based on a low resolution render. |
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Finally, click on the ‘Estimate
Cost’ button. The last field will display the
approximate time and cost to run it on the farm, based
on the information you entered.
Note:
for heavy Global Illumination (GI) / Global Radiosity (GR) projects, you must also take into account
the GI / GR preparation time, to be added to the rendering time itself.
Warning:
to optimize the cost / time ratio for animations (each
node render a single frame), we recommend you send sequences
where the number of frames is roughly a multiple of 120 frames. It takes the same
time to render 2 or 120 frames on the RANCH, as we
have more than 120 nodes working in parallel.
If you send significantly less than 120 frames, different nodes
will have to render the same frames => a waste of
resources and money (the cost would be the same for
2 or 120 frames as all the nodes would be rendering
anyway).
The cost estimator below will only give meaningful
results for >= 120 frames sequences. |
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| Copyright © Ranch
Computing 2007 - 2010 |
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