What is the difference between a traditional render farm and a cloud rendering render farm?
What is the difference between a traditional render farm and a cloud rendering render farm?
Generally, a render farm is a cluster of computers used to provide CGI (computer-generated imagery) through a batch processing method. While, a traditional one means building it on your own, which means you need to buy a lot of computers and fix them yourself whenever there is a problem. It is a local render farm, use local nodes.
Cloud rendering render farm, aka cloud render farm, online render farm, is a render centre that you can send your asset and render from far away, they are connected by the internet, “Cloud”, means internet. It becomes a kind of online services for artists to upload their tasks to the services providers, and download their final render results when completed.
However, when render farm is put on the ‘cloud’ it means faster because commercial render farms have better and more high capacity nodes, and some of them provide customer services and TD support for technical issues, like Fox Renderfarm. For eg, you are in India and you use cloud rendering render farm, wherever their servers are in, you still can use their platform to control their nodes to render your files, it can save your local hardware cost. if you don't have a stable render, using a cloud render farm would be much better than build an in house render farm, low cost and higher efficiency.
The advantages of using a cloud rendering render farm,
1. Powerful rendering speed
The top render farm companies can provide thousands of rendering nodes which have powerful CPUs and GPUs, it could definitely save your time on the rendering process.
2. Cost Effective
Compared with the traditional render farm, it would be much more cost-effective especially for a big project. You don't need to spend too much money to purchase hardware and maintain the network, and don't need to hire people to manage it.
3. 24*7 Customer Service and Technical Support
Around the clock customer service and technical support could always be a lifesaver if we met any problem when rendering but don't know how to solve it. The professional service team could totally help you with that.
4. Easy to Use Desktop App
Some online render farms have their own desktop app which has a lot of great features, such as drag and drop project submission, preview during rendering, automatically uploading and downloading project etc.
The disadvantages of using a cloud rendering render farm,
1. Security
Some small render farm will not sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement with customers, so you'd better find some high reputation company who had worked with big producing companies on famous films, if ever worked with OSCAR winners would be the best.
2. Software, Render and Plugin Compatibility
Different people would have different habits, so the more software, render & plugin the cloud render farm supports, the better. And if the online render farm can even support custom's own plugin, it would be a great added-value service.
Putting everything done on cloud is a kind of trend with a high-speed internet connection and large data transmission become more and more available. But the choice between the traditional one and online render farm depends on the needs of the project. But it’s always worth trying the cloud render farms, coz most of them give new users a free trial, like Fox Renderfarm, US$25 free trail is waiting for you.
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