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Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#51

Post by gabereiser »

IshKebab wrote: post #47
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really clear how this works from their site but I think they're basically just sending your raw blend files to random users without any protection or guarantee, legal or technical, that either the blends or the renders will be deleted afterwards. That's going to go down well with my clients. "What the prototype renders were leaked by some random teenager from Birmingham? No, I've no idea how they got hold of…

I think it's pretty clear that the service isn't for professionals. Possibly too niche to sustain a business.

I agree, right now. In the future that could change.

Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#52

Post by UncleEntity »

davissorenson wrote: post #43

A long time ago, I worked on Renderfarm.fi, which was like what you're proposing but free. I was just an extremely junior developer working on the front end. The volunteer computing system itself was based on BOINC. I recall it was quite the effort to keep it running. If I remember right we rendered everything multiple times on different nodes to make sure that jobs weren't being faked. There's no point to this post…

Is that the one which plugged the rendering hardware into space heaters to not waste the…wasted heat?

Was an awesome idea but I haven’t really been following that space for a long while.

Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#53

Post by whatsakandr »

dasokol112358 wrote: post #27
whatsakandr wrote: post #3

I 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?

It's on our roadmap to expand support to other systems such as Windows. May I ask why using a thumb drive is a deal breaker? Typically the setup for our software only takes around 15 minutes to complete, and we can have someone from our support team help walk you through it.

Its having to shutdown, and having to boot into another OS. That's fine if you're targeting a mining rig, but for a home pc, you can't do anything else with the machine. Hence the deal breaker.

Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#54

Post by yolo4553 »

dasokol112358 wrote: post #24
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #18

what.... 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.

Thanks for pointing this out! Octane benchmark is a rendering industry standard for pricing hardware. It's useful because when someone launches a rendering job, it doesn't just run on one device, say an RTX 3090 or 1660, but rather on a whole host of devices. Using this benchmark and our pricing of $.0019 per Octane benchmark hour, a 3090 would cost about $1.24/hr. The important thing to remember, and the reason we d…

Price wise the offering is not great (though not horrible either). Without any discounts (longer commitments or volume) you can rent e.g., RTX3090s for 1.30$/hr at genesiscloud.com. Those GPUs are hosted in proper datacenters, have fast and stable internet connections, and non of the security issues mentioned in the other comments.

It seems to me that you are attempting to position yourself mostly via your pricing while you might have much better chances highlighting ease of use. Purely price driven users do have better alternatives but those driven not entirely by price but also convenience is who you want to capture.

Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#55

Post by davissorenson »

UncleEntity wrote: post #52
davissorenson wrote: post #43

A long time ago, I worked on Renderfarm.fi, which was like what you're proposing but free. I was just an extremely junior developer working on the front end. The volunteer computing system itself was based on BOINC. I recall it was quite the effort to keep it running. If I remember right we rendered everything multiple times on different nodes to make sure that jobs weren't being faked. There's no point to this post…

Is that the one which plugged the rendering hardware into space heaters to not waste the…wasted heat? Was an awesome idea but I haven’t really been following that space for a long while.

No, Renderfarm.fi was completely based on volunteer computing, so there was no standardization.

Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#56

Post by Turing_Machine »

dasokol112358 wrote: post #31
Turing_Machine wrote: post #6

Are you also planning to offer other GPU-intensive tasks (e.g., Stable Diffusion)? Seems like an obvious expansion.

It's on our long-term roadmap to offer other services such as scientific computing, monte carlo simulation, AI, etc. One issue that arises from Deep Learning tasks such as stable diffusion is that the various devices in the network need to communicate periodically, especially when training models, which presents problems when the devices are scattered across the globe.

Yeah, I can see that distributed generation of a single image would be challenging, but from what I've seen it's very common to generate dozens or hundreds of independent images, then have a human select the best ones.

There's no need for coordination in that case.

Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

#58

Post by esquire_900 »

tehsauce wrote: post #29

I'm trying to compile a list of all crowd-sourced compute platforms that aren't exclusively for crypto purposes. So far I have: https://vast.ai https://rentaflop.com https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com Does anyone else know of any others? Thanks!

Thanks for the list, I ran across runpod.io yesterday (no experience with them though)
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