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

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

#1

Post by dasokol112358 »

Hi HN,

My name is David Sokol, and I'm the founder of rentaflop (https://rentaflop.com). We're a crowdsourced render farm aimed at making Blender rendering fast and affordable.

If you've used Blender, then I'm sure you've experienced the pain of waiting around for your animations to render. You've probably even had to sacrifice the quality of your work to reduce your render times. I've been there too.

If you're like me, then you're also disappointed with the alternative solutions: spending thousands of dollars on graphics cards or using prohibitively expensive cloud render farms to get fast render times. Our solution to this dilemma is to leverage low opportunity cost hardware from around the world to allow Blender artists to render their projects quickly, affordably, and without compromising on quality. Since most graphics card owners aren't utilizing their hardware to do valuable work 24/7, we provide them with a way to make money without lifting a finger, while lowering the cost curve for 3D rendering.

We're currently doing a public beta. If you'd like to try us, check out our site (https://rentaflop.com) and render your Blender project quickly and affordably! If you're a graphics card owner who wants to help Blender artists while earning money, reach out to support@rentaflop.com and we'll help you get set up.

We posted about our private beta on HN a few weeks ago. If you'd like, you can check out the discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32299674).

Please leave a comment below, we'd love to hear your thoughts :)

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

#2

Post by gardenfelder »

>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...

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

#4

Post by Youden »

The 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.

Given that, the break even is 757h, which is unexpectedly high.

Do you think your pricing is sustainable?

EDIT: To be clear, I'm aware of the model of using "spare" GPUs, my calculations were just for a point of comparison. What I'm asking is whether, with such low pricing, the company will have enough income to be long-term profitable.

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

#5

Post by dasokol112358 »

gardenfelder wrote: post #2

>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...

Crowdsourcing for machine learning is certainly possible, and it's one of the things we've thought about a lot. One issue that current Deep Learning algorithms, for instance, have with crowdsourcing is that they require periodic communication between devices to sync neural network weights. This is typically not an issue when devices are physically located in the same place with little network latency but becomes a bottleneck when the devices are scattered across the globe. With that being said, there are a few startups I'm aware of that are doing this sort of thing.

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

#9

Post by schaefer »

I love the fact that there is a program to actually pay GPU hosts that opt into the network. I'm planning to travel a bit this fall, and it would be a fun project to set up my system for this purpose whilst I'm away.

Mining bitcoin feels gross to me (no flame wars please)... but sharing GPUs with artists seems way more altruistic.

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

#10

Post by dasokol112358 »

Youden wrote: post #4

The 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…

Thank you for your question! We believe our pricing is competitive and tends to be one of our strong points, along with our speed. We charge considerably less than most other rendering services. Our farm will also render your projects much faster than a single RTX 3070 can render them.

For artists/studios who do a ton of rendering, it may be worth it for them to buy up many graphics cards and create their own private render farm. However, this requires considerable up-front cost as well as a lot of technical expertise, which many simply don't have. For a lot of them, it's a much better deal to render with rentaflop and not have the headache and cost of managing hardware.

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