[HN Gopher] Show HN: Rentaflop - Render your Blender projects wi...
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Show HN: Rentaflop - Render your Blender projects without
sacrificing quality
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 :)
Author : dasokol112358
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-09-14 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
| ttoinou wrote:
| How 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.)
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| We currently limit blend file size to 500MB and ensure our host
| hardware providers have the necessary bandwidth to handle
| transfers of this scale. We take measures to secure and bolster
| data privacy, but advise our users not to upload sensitive or
| confidential information that they can't allow others to see.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Rent-a-flop? That already exists and is called Amazon Prime.
| schaefer wrote:
| 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.
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| I'm glad you love it! If you'd like us to help get your system
| set up, please reach out to support@rentaflop.com
| davissorenson wrote:
| 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 other than a trip down memory lane.
| I wish you the best with this project!
| gardenfelder wrote:
| >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...
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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.
| tehsauce wrote:
| 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.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| 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.
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| But David, almost all production work requires NDA and IP
| protection. This is something you should focus on if you want
| studio work to utilize your service.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| 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 them. Honest guv!"
|
| Ah well time to add another clause the contract I use when
| subcontracting, something like "I affirm that I will not
| make use of Rentaflop during the fulfilment of this
| contract" should do it.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear that the service isn't for
| professionals. Possibly too niche to sustain a business.
| gabereiser wrote:
| I agree, right now. In the future that could change.
| [deleted]
| whatsakandr wrote:
| 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?
| SnooSux wrote:
| My familiarity with Docker tells me this wouldn't be
| unreasonable on Linux, but Windows would probably be
| challenging if not impossible. I'm much more familiar with
| Linux so take that with a grain of salt.
|
| I agree that I'd like to be able to do this without having to
| reboot and set things up before starting to mine/render.
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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.
| cowmix wrote:
| WSL2 only supports Nvidia and, specifically, CUDA for
| rendering... not OptiX.
| stuaxo wrote:
| With the cost of electricity going in the direction it is, I
| don't think this will be worthwhile for anyone in the UK.
| Youden wrote:
| 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 + <hours> * $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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It seems like you missed the entire part where they're not
| buying 3070s...
|
| People who already bought 3070s and would otherwise not be
| using them are providing the compute, so they don't need a
| realistic breakeven on an entire 3070. They essentially need to
| breakeven on electricity for the owner.
|
| Also they're not charging .0019 per Octane hour, it's per _
| Octanebench hour_. One GPU can provide more than 1 Octanebench
| hour of compute.
|
| Compare their pricing to the rest of the market and you'll see
| it's not unreasonably cheap:
| https://garagefarm.net/blog/garagefarm-net-adds-gpu-renderin...
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| I want to emphasize something here. Artists in general are
| not technical. Many don't have the knowledge and skills to
| build their own render farm. This is why services like yours
| exist. Don't listen to people trying to work the economics of
| build vs buy when a studio doesn't have the technical chops
| to run their own. If they did, they would. Some do. Most
| don't. If you're a Disney/Pixar or VFX shop you probably have
| it. If you are a freelance artist, you probably don't.
|
| Considering that Blender is being used more and more for high
| production shots, you'll be happy services like this exist.
| At least until you release your feature.
|
| Keep going. Folks who can build their own render farm, will,
| but the vast majority of artists won't.
| Youden wrote:
| What I mean isn't whether the price is competitive, I believe
| it absolutely is, what I mean is can you run a profitable and
| scalable company with that kind of pricing?
|
| Recruiting spare gamers' GPUs is one thing - those people
| bought the GPU anyway, so as long as you pay more than they
| pay for power, they're happy - but I imagine that's a
| relatively small pool of GPUs.
|
| At some point, you'll run out of those people, so I guess
| what I'm asking is whether the price you charge now is high
| enough that investors could profitably build and run their
| own "mining" hardware , while you still get enough of a cut
| to run your service.
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| Ah, I understand now. I believe there are enough private
| GPU owners around to sustain and scale rentaflop for many
| years to come. For instance, did you know there were around
| 10 million GPUs mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency at its
| peak? Our current prices allow our hosts to earn ~10x what
| crypto mining pays whenever they're processing rendering
| tasks for rentaflop. There are millions more GPUs owned by
| gamers, AI hobbyists, businesses, etc. that we hope to
| leverage to make 3D rendering more accessible to artists.
| If we manage to attract even a tiny fraction of these, we
| stand a chance at becoming the fastest and most affordable
| render farm on the planet.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > 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).
| kfarr wrote:
| The true cost of hardware is greater than the purchase price of
| the hardware. It's not feasible for everyone to buy hardware,
| esp. for intermittent load.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Cost of an RTX3070 right now is about $550 on Amazon
|
| The GPU market is beyond saturated, with prices crashing. There
| are predictions of _new_ 3090 's being $500 in 6 months as
| NVIDIA and their partners get desperate to offload 3000 series
| inventory to make room for 4000 series cards.
|
| Everyone and their cousin has a gaming PC now and even if a
| service like this were to take off, they'd have no shortage of
| suppliers (and competitors) and thus prices will plunge.
|
| I can't see this being a sustainable business model past 6-9
| months from now.
| programmarchy wrote:
| Sweet, maybe I can finally render volumetric clouds in Cycles
| now!
| tehsauce wrote:
| 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!
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| https://sonm.com/
| tehsauce wrote:
| Have you tried this? Do you know how well it works?
| 2StepsOutOfLine wrote:
| https://www.golem.network/
| wingmanjd wrote:
| Sheepit was fun. Ran a cluster of machines a while ago for just
| rendering for other artists.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Are you also planning to offer other GPU-intensive tasks (e.g.,
| Stable Diffusion)? Seems like an obvious expansion.
| tehsauce wrote:
| I am currently building this! You can try it out right now at
| https://computerender.com
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Seems to work pretty well! Thanks!
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| omoikane wrote:
| According 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?
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Useful work, fantastic !
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Are you experiencing significant performance penalties due to
| miner use of 1 lane PCIe risers?
|
| I did some testing for a version of such a service in 2017
| and it was determined the typical GPU miner configuration
| using x1 PCIe risers reduced I/O throughout and therefore
| performance of GPU hardware to the point of being practically
| useless for anything other than mining.
|
| I have no experience with the characteristics of rendering,
| I/O, etc but it seems this also applies.
| joeld42 wrote:
| This might have changed, but in my experience the big barrier to
| having a distributed render farm is transferring possibly many
| gigs of textures and resources (sims, point clouds, etc) to each
| render agent, not necessarily the render time. If you have to do
| this each time you hit render, it's a lot. If you keep the files
| online, where both the client and the render farm can see them,
| you're reinventing dropbox + all the complexity of a render farm
| on top of it.
|
| Also for commercial production use many VFX houses have contracts
| that don't let them send the assets out of house.
|
| This would be great for people doing styles that don't need a ton
| of assets tho, like procedural-heavy (geonodes) scenes.
|
| But as a hobbyist, I could definitely use something like this,
| and I'll check it out!
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 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.
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| 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 don't display our pricing
| like this, is that you aren't buying raw graphics card power
| from rentaflop or renting a single GPU. Instead, you're paying
| to have your Blender project rendered by dozens or even
| hundreds of graphics cards in parallel.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| ok. that makes sense that way but.... if i have a render job,
| can i know beforehand how much time/octane benchmark hour
| will it consume?
| dasokol112358 wrote:
| Great point. We're working on a render pricing estimator
| that allows you to upload a blend file and get an estimated
| price back. Until we have this, one way to see the
| estimated price of your render job is to upload your blend
| but cut the animation short. For instance, if your
| animation is 1000 frames, render the first 100 and
| extrapolate the price by 10x for a rough estimate. Then you
| can later render the rest by setting the animation in the
| blend file to only be frames 101-1000.
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