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Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 1:07 pm
by ROUBAL
@Kavorka : I have an ADSL2+ connection, giving me a maximum of 8.5 Mb ps for download and 0.85 Mb ps for upload on good days. The area is not desserved by cable or fiber optic, and will probably never. I have asked again to web providers on month ago. They also told me that even on fiber optic, the priority is given to download, and that the upload speed would not increase a lot, even on very fast connections. Even professional accounts don't give more : they allow more functionnalities for a higher cost, but no performance improvement.

I just upgraded to verizon FIOS and downloaded a 2 GB file in about 10 min last night. I didn't test upload speeds yet though.


Upload speed is generally around 1/10 of download speed, and rarely above 1Mbps.

@Gabrielefx :
When the scene is final there aren't problems to send it via we-transfer, it's fast.


If I am not wrong, We-transfer is just an intermediate. I doubt that tranferring to We-Transfer plus the transfer from We-Transfer to destination would be faster, as at least the first part of the path is the usual speed of my connection (weakest ring of the chain).

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 1:49 pm
by p3taoctane
I think the cloud system has several advantages.
I tested one a few months back and even though they only had 4 cards installed it enabled me to render from Starbucks from my Mac laptop etc.

Yes... upload time initially was high.... but the whole scene with all the textures etc took one hour to upload from work. I sent it before I drove home one night, got home had dinner then sat down at my laptop it was all there and started doing a few renders. I know you can do that with a system like Gabriel was talking about now. 8 titans remotely would certainly cook pretty well. There is a bit of a lag on a lot of mouse movements etc... but if you are sending to 128 cards... you get the ability to try anything and know if it will work or not in well under an hour... render it in minutes and charge your client for the render fee.

I would be willing to put up with the delays of sending to not have the cost of maintaing a large 8 card system... I do spend quite achunk of time upgrading drivers, running into trouble after upgrading drivers... system issues and the noise and power it sucks is no small annoyance.

It will not be the same as having 8 titans right beneath your desk as the Nividia boss said. But if I can model and tweak away for 2-3 hors upload in 30 mins and render in 3 mins... I get a better prepared model and still come out ahead time wise.

Looking forward to trying it even with the headaches of a beginning system.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:17 pm
by Refracty
The only thing that I would propose is to use custom GPUs with more RAM. 12GB would be a nice thing. So that would create a use for the Cloud system for complex scenes and it could really compete with CPU tasks.
Speed is one thing but I would prefer to have access to 64 GPUs with 12GB instead of 128 with 6GB to be honest.
I know that these systems are preconfigured but NVIDIA should offer this.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 8:16 pm
by InTheCity
Just how many of these 128GPU systems are they planning on creating.
I mean if it's just 1 big system, you're going to be hard pressed to cater to more than several users at one time.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 4:37 pm
by t_3
ROUBAL wrote:Maybe I have missed something, and probably I am going to say something stupid, but I have done some fast calculus and I don't understand the interest of Cloud computing from the distant client point of view :

imo - like almost everything - it just depends on; if you are a "pro" user, it might be much cheaper to invest in a fast internet connection to shorten upload times, than to wait 1-n hours per image. in case of corrections based on clients' requirements (usually told today evening and to happen until tomorrow morning ;)) this will save even more than just money (sleepless nights, reputation, ...).

if you take archviz for example, there are usually not that lots of big texture maps in use. also geometries compress extremely well - a 350mb .obj. only needs 85mb if compressed.

all in all there will be imo enough demand to let the farm gpus burn 24/7 right from the start, if only a fraction of the current octane userbase pushes the service.

... and if you i.e. use live-db materials in a scene, their textures might even be excluded from the upload. another possible path is to extend the live-db to hold a per-user library of materials online (with local caching), means even if it is empty at the beginning of a project, you propagate it with mats while you work on a scene, and therefore upload your stuff in chunks already along the way to a last & final rendering. it might be possible to cache texture maps, so that the same evermotion wood.jpg ;) isn't needed to upload for every project anew for 1000 people that are using it ;)

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:56 pm
by jmfowler
I was sure this service is aimed at professionals ( and FX studios ) who have the internet speeds and money to make use of it.
My current speed is 1.6mb download 0.8 upload - but fibre optic is being laid out around NZ cities at the moment which will take the speeds for surburban areas much much higher. Business's within city CBD's probably have fibre optic connections available.

I was also sure it went without saying that the primary use of this service would be for animations - which would have to use 3D model software file types like maya, max etc just like RebusFarm.
After all - the demo they gave was for an animation sequence of transformers running on Max. therefore the user would upload ( package ) their 3Ds max ( or maya etc ) file and textures to Octane cloud?

One thing I would recommend is for Otoy to precisely work out their refund policy - Rebusfarm's packaging utility neglected to include my IES files for a render sequence (despite their years of service???), which obviously didn't render properly, they refused to refund my money despite what I consider a failure on their part. To rub salt into the wound I did a small test on the same file setup a week later and found they had fixed the software fault...

JF.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:34 pm
by pixelrush
@refracty
I read yesterday on the web that there is a Tesla k300? coming with 12 gb vram. Not sure Geforce will ever have that much but if there is a computational farm with these Teslas then they might welcome a bit of extra business to fill their idle time from Octane users via the Cloud Edition.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 12:24 am
by ROUBAL
@t-3 :
it might be much cheaper to invest in a fast internet connection to shorten upload times


As I said, even on fiber optic and pro accounts, here upload bitrate doesn't exceed 1Mbps. Priority is gived by web providers to download. The upload direction is neglected. Added to that, only very urbanized areas are equiped with fiber optic. My area may never be. The closest fiber optic provider told me that even on equiped areas, the upload speed could increase up to 5Mbps, but not before two years in best cases (information from less than one month ago).

if you take archviz for example, there are usually not that lots of big texture maps in use. also geometries compress extremely well - a 350mb .obj. only needs 85mb if compressed.


I understand that there are probably many architects interested by such service, but my main concern since the beginning of Octane is to get photo realistic animations.

Currently, export time to a compatible format is already a problem. Compression may shorten the upload transfer to the cloud, but the compression process also requires time. Added to that, for an animation, various files of various format have to be gathered and packed, and compressed for each sent frame (Characters with fur need updated scatter files for each frame - My current character supports no less than 3 scatter files). This means that an automated process (included in plugins ?) for each 3D package (including Blender, I hope) would be required to allow the shortest upload time for animations.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 1:50 pm
by Refracty
pixelrush wrote:@refracty
I read yesterday on the web that there is a Tesla k300? coming with 12 gb vram. Not sure Geforce will ever have that much but if there is a computational farm with these Teslas then they might welcome a bit of extra business to fill their idle time from Octane users via the Cloud Edition.


12GB VRam would be wonderful. A dual Titan with 2*6GB would be a nice thing, too.

Re: Announcing Octane Render Cloud Edition

PostPosted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 10:38 am
by Reality4
It doesn't feel like the previous reactions do your cloud system justice.

This is truly amazing, a visionary step in the history of 3D rendering. Path tracing in almost realtime... wow. I'm so excited at all the possibilities.

The starting point with up to 128 gpu's with 4GB ram is also amazing.

For me uploading is no problem at all, I'm connected to the Amsterdam glass fiber network with 6 megabyte (not megabit) upload per second.

It pains me that the beta is only available in the US. When do you think a beta or release in Europe will start?