Rendergate Infos

The following article was created from the presentation Roy Ammerschuber gave on the 27.06.2023 at the Web Zurich.

Theres also a longer version here

Introduction

I have been working on various 3D animations since I was 11, mainly in the construction industry. In order to process the 3D models into a video, they had to be rendered.

Rendering

During rendering, hundreds of light rays are simulated for each pixel as they bounce off walls and refract through glass. This process is very time-consuming and can take 10-20 minutes per image. For a short 3-minute video, this means that rendering can take 30 days on your own PC.

Temporary Renderfarm

Our videos were originally not that long. But with each animation we produced, the rendering time got longer until we had an animation that would have taken 200 hours (8 days) to render. We were only able to render this with difficulty by spreading it over several of our computers. This allowed us to reduce the time to half a week.

To avoid getting into such a situation again, we developed a render farm for internal use. This enabled us to have the animation processed in the cloud instead of blocking our own PC. In the cloud, it is calculated with several servers in parallel, which has reduced our render times to a tenth.

Originally, we had only developed the cloud solution for internal use for our own animations. In the process, we noticed many opportunities for improvement. For example, completely automating the process and also adding warnings if you forget to upload any files. It wouldn’t have been worth implementing these improvements for just our own animations. We decided to professionalize our cloud solution and market it commercially.

Development Rendergate

To do this, we reprogrammed the render farm from scratch to make it as easy to use as possible. Part of this was to develop a pre-calculation feature that automatically calculates time and costs before rendering. We also added warnings for forgotten textures and other errors and many other features to make it easier to use. We’ve also added support for GPUs that allow you to render up to 20x faster than on your own PC. With these improvements, you can now render the 3min video we talked about at the beginning, which would have originally taken 30 days to render, in just 1.5 days without straining your own computer.

Comparison to our Competitors

The idea of the render farm is not new, the overall market is confusing. The performance/cost parameters are just as confusing. We have therefore carried out a market analysis between the most renowned render farms. We made a comparison with BlenderGrid, Conductortech, Fox Renderfarm, Garage Farm, Raysrender, Rebus Farm, Renderflow, RenderGate, RenderStreet and Superrenders. We also carried out a standardized test render with the well-known Cosmos Laundromat demo in which we rendered 100 images on each farm. The result is that the render farms that were able to render the scene at all took between 10min and 2h and cost between 5$ and 33$.

The complete comparison can be found here RenderGate and Garage Farm are the favorites in this comparison. Garage Farm costs 10$ and takes 20min and also has the advantage that it not only supports Blender but also V-Ray. RenderGate costs 5$ and only takes 10min and is therefore twice as fast and half as expensive. RenderGate also has a pre-calculation so that customers know in advance how much they will have to pay.

RenderGate has been running since 2020 without any technical problems and we already have 60 registered users. There have been no complaints from these users about the rendering process.