Chaos Group has announced the launch of Chaos Cloud, its new online rendering service available with a single click from 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino, Cinema 4D, Revit, Modo, Houdini [in beta] and SketchUp. Features include the ability to retain data in the cloud so that only those parts of a scene that change need to be uploaded, this includes the ability to reuse assets that have been uploaded in the past, even if they’ve been renamed or used in a different scene.
Chaos Cloud’s interface is browser-based, allowing users to check on the status of a render from any compatible device, view the rendering live and control renders.
Chaos Cloud uses a credit system, you can see some examples of costs for different render scenarios here. Prices start from $100 for 100 credits and decrease when bought in higher volumes. New users will get 20 free trial credits.
To find out more visit Chaos Group’s website.
Thanks for sharing!
Stupid question, possibly. Are these prices per frame?
you really should try clicking the link. 🙂
Is that a yes?
it’s not an answer. it is a pointer to the answer.
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
its bloody expensive to use….i wish it was cheaper right now I cant use it for animations as rendering costs are more than my budgets
That was the point of my original question. I did actually click on the link, but looking at that cityscape example, it would cost over $1000 to render a 10 sec clip at HD. I suppose that if you work at a certain level, it makes sense, but I’ll stick to my own render nodes for just now.
It pretty much depends on the scene. That cityscape example is extremely complex and very slow to render. On a typical desktop workstation [latest i7, 12 threads], that will take 4-5 times more time for 4K images. Let’s say 15 hours x 300 frames -> 4,500 hours [about half a year] on a single desktop machine. If you run that shot on 100 machines, you have to rent them or buy them which will be very expensive. Then you need to deal with software licenses, data transfers to/from the cloud. Storage. Failures. Replications. Efficiency with orchestration of the VMs and so many complex issues. The goal of Chaos Cloud was always to provide simplicity and ease of use, with great speed. Yes, that may seems like a bit expensive, because everything is inclusive, again for simplicity. If you count all other cost variables, I believe our price will look very attractive for what we offer. We are constantly optimizing our software and if you compare V-Ray 3.6 to V-Ray Next (4.x) you can get 30-50% speed increase, which means 50% less cost in the cloud.
Chaos Cloud is very scalable for animations. We are also working hard to introduce Cloud Swarm [distributed rendering] per single frame in order to deliver any single frame in constant time of minutes, not hours or days. There is still work to be done. I’ll be happy to discuss features or pricing models with you.
Is there a cost calculator somewhere?
Because without a proper prediction deciding to use this service is jumping on the void, examples are not good enough, I saw the website but I cannot compute how much could cost an animation with my scene.
Everything you say is true and is right, but if I go to Rebus I can do an approximate calc, it’s not exact at all, but it’s approximate and good enough for me to be able to quote to my clients the render cost, all the renderfarms have similar costs, no matter if you call it cloud or just renderfarm, there could be some small differences but for the final customer, us, in the end it is exactly the same, I just need a bunch of computers to compute my animation and give me my frames in the easiest possible way. 🙂
BTW taking as an example a render of 15h/frame it’s a bit excessive unless you are a big studio IMHO.
Cheers!
Sure, I appreciate the complexity of that city scene. I will give it a try sometime soon to see if it would work for me. I exist at the opposite end of the scale, and never do renders that take that long, but sometimes I get things, usually noise artifacts, that prove a real problem, and maybe the cloud service might be useful in those cases.
How does this deal with 3rd party plugins and assets?
We have a list of supported 3rd party plugins in the docs. That’s for 3ds Max. For all other DCCs we have 100% support in the cloud.
OK, and for those reading along, the link to the supported plugins (and other features) is https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY4MAX/Chaos+Cloud+Supported+Features#ChaosCloudSupportedFeatures-3rdPartyPlugins
Strange that there are VRay features that aren’t supported, odd things like the sphere object, makes me wonder what they’re using to render?
Probably Vray Standalone, that is slightly different than Vray for 3dsmax, more similar to Vray for Maya AFAIK