Ultra Render Farm - FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

How many machines will run my job?

All projects will be allocated machines based on availability. You should reserve time if you know you will need it and want priority on the farm.

When will you stage my job?

Our working hours are 9am to 6pm and this is when we are available to discuss, estimate and stage your project. We are often available to help outside these hours but can not guarantee availability. Contact us in advance if you anticipate sending a rush job outside normal hours. Additional charges may apply in this case.

Can I directly access and control your render farm?

For a variety of reasons we do not offer outside control or a front-end client for our farm. We want to manually stage and confirm each project, maintain security and confidentiality, and balance project loads appropriately.

How do you make sure to get them right?

Usually we render some tests and send them to you before starting the job, to make sure they match your expectations. For example, for a 1200 frame animation we might render every 50th frame and send a set of 24 JPG files to you for confirmation.

Will you sign an NDA and promise to delete data when the job is complete?

Yes, we are happy to confirm our confidentiality on your project and data.

Is prepayment required?

After we run test renders and send them to you for confirmation, you can prepay half the job estimate to get started. The remainder will be due on delivery. We can take Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or PayPal. You can pay via company check if you wish to pay in advance.

What's all this about light cache and irradiance maps?

Mental Ray and VRay use an approximation of light reflection to create Global Illumination (GI). If you run an animation with each frame's GI calculated independently, you risk getting a different GI lighting result for each frame which creates a flicker effect when the movie plays back. This effect can range from almost imperceptible (sunlit exteriors) to horrible (interiors with lots of indirect light). In VRay you can use "Brute Force" to avoid this problem (or actually reduce it to the problem of a "graniness" effect that is less irritating) but render times are usually prohibitive. So VRay users commonly choose Irradiance Maps (and a Light Cache option for secondary light bounces), which render fast but will flicker without precalculation. Mental Ray's Final Gather is similarly likely to flicker without precalculation.

To avoid this problem with VRay, GI is calculated for the entire animation first. For animations where only the camera is moving, one machine calculates the GI from beginning to end and saves a file that the entire farm will use. This calculation is usually fairly quick because sampling gets faster after the first frame GI is calculated. That is because only new areas are sampled as the camera moves, and typically only every 5th frame is calculated if the camera is moving at a normal pace. For animations where things are changing (moving objects, lights, etc.) VRay offers animated irradiance maps that work similar to the way images are blended in CG to produce motion blur: All the frames have uniquely calculated irradiance maps, and these are blended in weighted manner at the currently rendered frame. Obviously, animated irradiance maps take a lot longer to render because every single frame is rendered instead of every 5th frame, and there is no speed up from already-sampled areas since things are moving in the animation and therefore all areas are sampled from scratch for each frame.

You can run your own precalc and provide it with your project data. Or we can calculate it for you. Estimating this cost is difficult but generally a camera-only animation will render Light Cache and Irradiance Maps in 3-8 hours on one computer for a typical 600 frame animation. For sequential irradiance maps, you might look at the per-frame time to render irradiance maps as a percentage of total render time on your machine. For example if your frames take 3 minutes to render the irradiance map and 6 minutes to do the final rendering on a single frame, you could add 50% to the cost estimator to cover rendering a unique irradiance map for each frame. For Mental Ray, you should precalculate your own final gather file and provide it with your project.

Read more about Light Cache and Irradiance Maps at the VRay on-line manual.

I have a job that uses VRay for Sketchup, how many machines will you use for my job?

Currently VRay for Sketchup does not offer a rendering client to split frames across a farm, so we use its distributed rendering system to apply 10 machines to your project.

How do I bundle up my scene for transmitting to you?

You need to make sure to include all files that are needed to render. Here’s a list of file types, note that many are not found by the “archive” or “resource collector” tools:

1. Texture maps – those used by VRay in unique VRayMtl map slots won’t be found with max’ resource collector
2. xref objects or scenes – check under file/xref to see what files are used in your scene.
3. vrayproxies – these files have .vrmesh for a suffix and need to be included. Please advise us on these as each one will require remapping to the new disc location at our end.
4. Irradiance, light cache, final render maps – if you precalculate these elements you’ll need to send them as well.
5. Other unique content – RPC textures, special plugins or related data.

Please use WINZIP (www.winzip.com) or RAR (www.rarsoft.com) to create one big file of all the parts of your scene.

In 3ds max you can use File/Asset Tracking to check all the files your scene requires and double check this against the files in your zip to confirm all the files are included.

How do I transmit my file to UltraRenderFarm?

Our preferred method, if you are familiar with using an FTP client, is to set up an FTP account for you on our server, and provide a login/password to you by email. Just send a note to sales@ultrarenderfarm.com .

If you are uncomfortable with using an FTP client, there are many free “large file sending” sites on the web such as the following:

www.sendthisfile.com  (opens new window)
www.sendspace.com  (opens new window)
www.yousendit.com  (opens new window)
www.beamfile.com  (opens new window)

Or, if you prefer to host the files at your own site, just let us know how to go get them. 

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Have questions? Contact us today!

Ultra Render Farm
1-800-548-1578 Toll Free
1-816-525-0103 International
sales@ultrarenderfarm.com Email