[RenderFred]

Hi James,

I would say that it is not clear Some simple scenes are really faster like the RANCHecker benchmark scene, and most big scenes do not seem to go faster. I guess it depends on what is used in the scenes. I did not really have the time to do scientific comparisons, from the quality point of view. I think the best would be for Maxwell devs to tell us what has changed and on what kind of scenes we may expect speed/quality improvements...

[RenderFred]

Hi,

we are happy to announce that we have completed our RANCH Runner upgrade. The beast is now packed with 136 Xeon X5650 + 136 Xeon E5645.

In practice it is about twice as fast as before, which always helps . RANCHecker has been updated too, as its benchmark and cost/time estimation tools needed to be recalibrated for the new performance.

Fred

[RenderFred]

Hi,

In short, 4 news:

- we are now running with Maxwell 2.6.10 (x64)
- a new version of RANCHecker (1.51) is available (to match some URLs which have changed on the RANCH site)
- check our new prices on the highest priorities, you'll have a good surprise
- if you want to increase your in-house computing power, we have a special promotion on render servers (great prices )

Cheers,

Fred

[RenderFred]

Hi everyone,

Just to announce that the RANCH Runner speed has been increased by 30%. Each Maxwell cooperative project is now rendered by 176 dual Xeon nodes (merging time stays more or less the same thanks to software optimizations). A new version of RANCHecker (1.6) has been released to take the additional computing power into account. It also has a new option to choose between maximum compression and maximum speed when preparing your project archive before sending it to the RANCH. It may save you some upload time

Cheers,

Fred

[Bubbaloo]

Hi Fred, how much RAM is available on the Ranch?

[RenderFred]

Hi Bubbaloo,

we have currently 24 GB per node (so 21/22 GB really available for rendering, the rest being eaten by the OS and various processes).

Fred

[RenderFred]

Hi,

just to inform everyone that we are now running with Maxwell 2.7.0.0 (standalone, and also as a plugin for Max and Maya animations). There is a new RANCHecker version (1.7) for 2.7 compatibility and some changes to our PDF guide for Maxwell too.

As for previous versions each cooperative Maxwell project is rendered by 176 Dual Xeon nodes (176 x 12-core/24-thread). MXI merging time may be a bit slower with 2.7 for low/medium projects but faster for high def images (a consequence of the new MXI compression). Of course the main advantage of MXI compression is that the final MXI will be smaller and take less time to download - the drawback being that it is no longer possible to predict the merging time beforehand since the compression ratio varies with each scene (a 500 MB compressed MXI can be the equivalent of a 1 GB or a 3 GB uncompressed MXI... the latter taking 3 times as much to merge as the former, even though they are both 500 MB MXIs...)

And congratulations to the Next Limit team for the new grass system and other improvements (that reminds me that it would be great to have mixed Vue xStream + Maxwell projects! - highly complex natural environments + Maxwell image quality would be fantastic)

Fred

[Rob_Lucy]

If I remember correctly, there was a 5Gb limit for the MXI.
If that limit is still valid, that means we can render bigger images, right?

[RenderFred]

If I remember correctly, there was a 5Gb limit for the MXI.
If that limit is still valid, that means we can render bigger images, right?

That's right, however do not forget that a 5 GB compressed MXI may be equivalent to a 20 GB uncompressed MXI, with the corresponding merging time (_huge_). So you must be very careful with > 1 GB compressed MXIs

[Rob_Lucy]

Cool.
Thanks a lot!

[scotthik]

Hi.
Will you also be supporting animation from Cinema4d + Maxwell?

Thank you.

[RenderFred]

Hi.
Will you also be supporting animation from Cinema4d + Maxwell?

Thank you.

We would like to do that yes, but I can't be more precise than that for the moment.

[Asmithey]

Anyone else trying to render on the Ranch today/ night, where ever you may be. It seems there is an animation job thet is broke and back logging the server.

Back online....YES!

[RenderFred]

Anyone else trying to render on the Ranch today/ night, where ever you may be. It seems there is an animation job thet is broke and back logging the server.

Back online....YES!

Hi Aaron,

no there was no problem, just a very heavy animation (two hours per frame is not uncommon for some projects - and we have seen worse).

[RenderFred]

Hi everyone,

just to announce that the RANCH is now running with Maxwell 2.7.20. Performance seems similar to 2.7.10, so the current version of RANCHecker will work with 2.7.20.

Fred