Hi everyone,
A quick little share: The kind folks at iRender just let me have 1 free hour to try out their services. They have a gang of variously powered threadripper machines with single, dual, quad and octo cards. They are not a render farm. You create and log into a virtual machine and must use your own rhino license to run your own software. You don’t upload a scene file, you log into the machine through a basic RD client and do it all yourself, running rhino or whatever plugins you install on your own Virtual Machine.
The startup and boot time was longer than I expected but you don’t pay for that. I’d say about 15min before you get your mouse busy in Rhino or other.
They are based in Vietnam but the lag was almost nothing, prices low. $20 US for 3 hours of machine time. I spat out one test render at 5k x3k pixels with glass and reflections in 5 minutes or less, that would’ve taken my machine…ummm… longer to do.
This solution is great for anyone who is not committed to and using any of the mainstream engines yet. Allows you to quickly use way more powerful machines to do any kind of work needed. I will be using them for some CFD stuff soon I’m guessing.
These were machines with 256GB of ram, yet I still couldn’t run two heavy instances of rhino. The threadrippers maybe don’t handle true task sharing of rhino cpu cycles as well as Intel does? Not sure. But the single instance was blazing.
At the end of the session you shut down the VM, your ‘image’ of materials stays securely on their end, ready for you to pop back whenever. This is the standard cloud work thing now I know. Funny how we’re going back to or never really left ‘dumb’ terminals from yesteryear. I’m in the U.S. and running a job on a computer in Vietnam, crazy world.
Later,
Robert