For me the most obvious issue with it is that, unlike on a reputable render farm, the confidentiality of renders isn't in any way guaranteed, which is a full stop deal breaker for most professional work. Sure this might work for hobby projects but even on my hobby projects I want to retain control of my own IP. If I used you for professional work I would be breaking some of the terms of pretty much every contract I've ever been asked to sign as a creative. Not sure how you get around that unless you run blender in a black box process.
Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#12The big question is the pricing and whether it really does make sense to pay for your service instead of purchasing hardware. Your pricing is $0.0019 per Octane hour. IIUC, that means that an hour of time on an RTX3070 - scoring 400 - costs $0.76. Cost of an RTX3070 right now is about $550 on Amazon and with a TDP of 220W and an average price (in the US) of $0.15/kWh, the total cost will be $550 + * $0.15 * 0.22. Giv…
> Do you think your pricing is sustainable?
I think you're kind of missing the point. Most non-professional artists (which there's a lot of!) won't need to come close to the break even point. When I was doing modeling and speed painting in school, I probably used about 80 render hours a year on our farm. I never "went" professional, but I can imagine that smaller shops probably aren't spending that much time doing deliverable renders. I bet a lot of small shops with a small farm under the desk are going to sign up to be providers for this as well.
Not to mention, you're talking about one GPU :) That's very slow. You really need to consider that for complex scenes, having twelve GPUs running for five minutes is way more convenient than one GPU running for an hour. Now, suddenly, that changes the math significantly - you're talking about buying 4x gpus (and the "sleds" required to run them - another $600 or so).
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#13According to this page: https://portal.rentaflop.com/blog/hosting It sounds like this is a cryptocurrency miner plus rendering farm, and participants will be paid in cryptocurrencies?
Many of our early hardware providers (hosts) are crypto miners, as they often have many graphics cards. As a result, we pay our hosts in crypto in order to attract them to our network. Our software, rentaflop miner, doesn't behave like a normal miner, however. Its goal is to take existing cryptocurrency miners who mine currencies like Ethereum and give their hardware more useful work such as rendering.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#14>We're able to maintain fast rendering while charging ~50% less than most render farms by crowdsourcing. We leverage underutilized graphics cards from hardware owners across the globe to keep rentaflop fast and affordable. Seti@home meets Blender. I wonder if that would work for machine learning...
There is https://vast.ai which is a generic GPU crowdsourcing platform.
There are limitations that make it difficult to set up their machines as infrastructure however.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#15I was interested, but having to run an entire OS off thumb drive is a deal breaker for me. I'm naive in this area, but would it be that hard to implement it under WSL2?
WSL2 only supports Nvidia and, specifically, CUDA for rendering... not OptiX.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#16For me the most obvious issue with it is that, unlike on a reputable render farm, the confidentiality of renders isn't in any way guaranteed, which is a full stop deal breaker for most professional work. Sure this might work for hobby projects but even on my hobby projects I want to retain control of my own IP. If I used you for professional work I would be breaking some of the terms of pretty much every contract I'v…
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Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#17Are you also planning to offer other GPU-intensive tasks (e.g., Stable Diffusion)? Seems like an obvious expansion.
I am currently building this! You can try it out right now at https://computerender.com
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#18what.... does $0.0019 per octane hour pricing mean?
how much is a graphics card on offer currently? say RTX 3090ti or 3050ti or something else for example?
$0.0019 is not explanatory without giving examples.
can you improve your pricing page to include such details?
like say
$0.0019 in terms of graphics cards mean
RTX 3090 is $x/hour.
RTX 1660 is $x/hour.
titan x is $x/hour.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#19How do you deal with the fact that you have to transfer Blender projects to your crowdsourced computers ? (time to transfer, protection of private projects etc.)
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#20For me the most obvious issue with it is that, unlike on a reputable render farm, the confidentiality of renders isn't in any way guaranteed, which is a full stop deal breaker for most professional work. Sure this might work for hobby projects but even on my hobby projects I want to retain control of my own IP. If I used you for professional work I would be breaking some of the terms of pretty much every contract I'v…
While we take measures to secure and bolster data privacy, it's possible for hosts to be malicious. As a result, you should never run workloads containing sensitive or confidential information on rentaflop. In the future, we may decide to offer a special service that renders your work only on rentaflop-owned hardware.
With that being said, there are plenty of Blender projects that don't have this requirement, and we aim to focus on these types of projects.