[Maxer]

I'm trying to get an idea of how many people would be interested in making use of a Maxwell render farm.

This would be specifically set up for Maxwell users so any suggestions as to how to make this work best for you would be very helpful. Also give me an idea of what a fair price would be for renderings and animatons.

[bader]

good idea

fair price would be for renderings and animatons.

-make different type of prices : student .... users ... ETC .

-will u can set price by size of the image or every 2x2 IN .

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[Frances]

I think the going rate is $1.50 US per cpu hour with a base fee for file handling.

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[Frances]

so 8 proc running a highres image for 4 hours would be 48$..i'd buy that

Handling fees average $50 US per file. And that would theoretically be the equivalent of running a render for 32 hours, right? That is provided that cooperative rendering worked optimally.

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[Frances]

i wonder how they make money with 1.5$ per cpu hour it seems to be a tough business

Maybe that's why EFX-1 fell off the face of the earth?

Say you have 400 cpus. If you can keep them cranking away all at once, it's $600/hr plus fees.

Render farms are like boats and horses - it's best if you just know someone who's got one.

[Mihai]

are you sure about that number Frances? Seems very low...

The best and cheapest solution would be if we have somebody we can trust and a group of people chip in and have a "community" renderfarm. This person would have to be in the US since hardware prices are roughly 40% cheaper than in the EU, due to the exchange rates. Also I think electricity is MUCH cheaper in the US than here.

Cheaper for all of us since it wouldn't be a business run for profit
Well, just a dream really.....I must get tom and Hervé to back me up on this scheme.......

[Maxer]

Thanks for all the replies so far!
Just to answer a few questions, this farm will probably only run part time at first so it will almost be a first come first serve type of service. It's going to have about 120 available processors which is more than enough to run multiple jobs at once. Pricing will be less than what you see from farms like Rezpower but I'm not sure what it's going to be exactly. The speed of the system right now is about 360 GHz so it will be growing all the time.

[Frances]

are you sure about that number Frances? Seems very low...

That's what I paid last Fall.

The best and cheapest solution would be if we have somebody we can trust and a group of people chip in and have a "community" renderfarm. This person would have to be in the US since hardware prices are roughly 40% cheaper than in the EU, due to the exchange rates. Also I think electricity is MUCH cheaper in the US than here.

Cheaper for all of us since it wouldn't be a business run for profit
Well, just a dream really.....I must get tom and Hervé to back me up on this scheme.......

The best and cheapest solution is for Next Limit to develop a price structure for render node licenses. Then established farms would be more willing to invest in supporting Maxwell once it's released for production.

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[Maxer]

If everything works out I'd say within the next month or so, it also depends on what happens with the Beta version.

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[Maxer]

Anyone who is imediatley in need of this type of service can e-mail me at:

3dwork@sbcglobal.net