All posts related to V2
User avatar
By RenderFred
#338683
bjorn.syse wrote:There it is, thank you! So, no spaces in filenames, hello 20'th century :)
He he, yes it may seem strange, but you cannot imagine the infinite number of ways a project can go wrong :wink: Parsing project names and files coming from so many different users and scenes and software packages, in a completely automated system, is very complex. Between superlong filenames which can cause command line problems, non-international characters you can find in french, spanish, german, etc. extra dots, spaces, commas... On the software we develop we manage to catch most of the problems, but in the whole pipeline many programs must communicate, and each one deals with this differently. So, to be on the safe side, it is always best to go with [a..A] [z..Z] [0..9] and '_' characters in filenames and avoid the others. That being said, in the next version of RANCHecker I will probably force the renaming of the scene to replace spaces with underscores.
User avatar
By RenderFred
#338821
JamesColeman wrote:Hi, I tried to register on ranchcomputing(dot)com and didn't receive a confirmation e-mail, and I sent a message to support with no reply either. Any idea what's going on?
James,

the validation e-mail was probably caught by an overzealous antispam filter.. Anyway we have activated your account now.

Fred
User avatar
By JamesColeman
#338830
RenderFred wrote:
JamesColeman wrote:Hi, I tried to register on ranchcomputing(dot)com and didn't receive a confirmation e-mail, and I sent a message to support with no reply either. Any idea what's going on?
James,

the validation e-mail was probably caught by an overzealous antispam filter.. Anyway we have activated your account now.

Fred
Thanks
User avatar
By RenderFred
#341461
el.mustafa wrote:Hi Ranch,

It's been a long while that you've promised Maya support coming soon.

El
Yes you are right, and we will do it 'soon' :) More seriously, it will be in May. We are very busy at the moment promoting the RANCH ViP Club (unlimited rendering for a year for members) and doing software optimizations, and as always time flies... But soon is really soon now.

Fred
By el.mustafa
#341471
Hi RenderFred,

I believe you this time :)

The Maya/Maxwell workflow must be rare compared to 3DSMax and the others.

Good luck with the VIP club promotion.
Unfortunately I can't consider it as I rely on Maya animations and exporting files to
MXS before sending to the Ranch takes up too much memory.

Bye
El
User avatar
By RenderFred
#342074
Hi everyone,

if you are a company or a freelance artist doing 3d rendering all year, what would you say if, for a fixed annual fee, you could get unlimited free rendering for a full year on one of the most powerful rendering systems available today?

That's exactly what we are proposing with the RANCH ViP Club. If you are interested, all the details are here.

Please be aware that the number of seats is limited (100 members max)... the subscription will be closed on May 31.

Cheers,

Fred
User avatar
By RenderFred
#346061
Hi everyone,

Since the installation of our RANCH Runner, we have worked hard to reach a goal: to become the most affordable high performance rendering service on the market. Well, today is the day!

We will let you judge if we have succeeded. As we want to be completely transparent about it, here are all the details:

1) our base price (Sapphire formula) is now 2.9 cents ($) per GHz-Hour (~ 2.0 euro-cents per GHz-H). We have 4 levels of priority (Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond), the most expensive being 6.2 euro-cents per GHz-H, which is still very affordable. The priorities are there to sort the projects in the waiting list, if you are in a hurry you can raise your priority to climb to the top. And as we also have discounts for quantities, the actual price could be even less than that (up to 70% discount!).

2) for the technically inclined: your project is rendered on our RANCH Runner, a modular multinode system driven by proprietary - and highly optimized - management software. It is currently configured with 128 Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs (6-core) for a total of 768 cores and 1536 render threads, organized in 64 dual nodes with 24 GB RAM each. There is no time shared on the RANCH, so each projet is guaranteed to benefit from the full power of the system when it is processed: you get the same level of performance, everytime.

3) As a concrete example, a project which takes around one week to render on a Core i7 PC is rendered in approximately one hour, for $60 (~ 42 €) with the Sapphire priority. Depending on the discount you get, this hour could cost as low as $18 (~12/13 €).

We hope that this will bring new possibilities to a lot of 3D artists and companies who previously couldn't afford to use a rendering service!

Cheers,

Fred

RANCH Computing Metasite
User avatar
By RenderFred
#348976
Hi,

Just to announce that the RANCH is now running with Maxwell 2.6.0.0. A new version of RANCHecker, our preparation/benchmark/cost estimation tool is online for 2.6 compatibility (your current version should detect the new update automatically). The update was necessary as Maxwell 2.6 is clearly faster than 2.5 on the RANCHecker benchmark scene. Enjoy!

Fred
By zdeno
#349002
RenderFred wrote:... The update was necessary as Maxwell 2.6 is clearly faster than 2.5 on the RANCHecker benchmark scene.....
how much faster ? Can You tell us ?
User avatar
By JamesColeman
#349355
Hi Fred, I was wondering if you could help me with a general speed issue I'm having after upgrading to 2.6.
First of all when I tested the Benchwell scene it took about 5% longer in 2.6 compared to 2.5.1
In all subsequent tests 2.6 takes longer to reach a certain SL than 2.5.1 or reaches a lower SL in the same time as 2.5.1
The only test I've done so far that is faster in 2.6 is your RANCHecker benchmark (Absolute) which reached SL 6.62 in 2.6 compared to SL 4.46 in 2.5.1 (both 59 seconds).
Even 8ball_ranch is slower, reaching SL 12.33 in 2.6 (in 4 minutes 59 seconds) and SL 12.43 in 2.5.1 (5 minutes).

I know that perhaps it's better to look at the quality of the image instead of relying purely on SLs, but have you seen an improvement in speed/quality in 2.6 as a whole?

I'm using OSX 10.6.8 64-bit.
  • 1
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]