We are investigating the possiblity of using the Google Cloud as a 3DS Max 2015 rendering resource.
I’ve setup with the cloud wizard succesfully, but can’t figure out how to get a windows image into the compute platform with 3DS max to allow rendering, or how the balancer then knows to use this instance?
As far as I can see Windows server can be setup as an image, although not an option due to the licensing costs, but can’t see how to setup a standard windows pro workstation license.
Currently, all public cloud providers only offer Server editions of Windows for use on the cloud. Even Microsoft only permits Pro versions on Azure for the purpose of dev testing (for testing builds of software against Pro, as opposed to using Pro for general compute). That said, if you still want help setting up Windows Server images, let us know. We have some not-yet-released docs that may be of help, and we’re happy to set up a GoToMeeting if needed.
Thanks for the clarification, that was what I was beginning to fear was the answer.
So that pretty much shafts using the cloud for 3DS Max, unless there is some other way you are aware of?
Just doing a quick calculation on the Google cloud pricing calculator puts the OS charge at half the monthly cost for the cloud server bill, or more specifically nearly $1000 for a month full 24/7 usage for the OS alone on a 32 core machine, and as the OS charge seems to scale directly with the server specified for some reason, there’s no benefit of using multiple slower machines.
I think for a total of $2000/month for what isn’t even a cutting edge specification I’ll just buy more internal rack servers and recoup the cost in 2 months or so.
I can see the benefit of you guys offering the capability and the Cloud Wizard certainly made what is quite a confusing process much easier, but what is your thinking on the whole windows based software issue.
There is no doubt that the cost of Windows Server instances is significant. It comes down to a question of whether the benefits of flexibility and scalability on the cloud are worth the cost. Of course the answer will be unique to each studio, based on their unique production needs.
One way to reduce costs is through the use of Preemptible Instanaces on GCP or Spot Instances on AWS. These are both heavily discounted instance types with the caveat that they may be terminated by the provider under certain conditions.
Balancer currently supports only traditional “on-demand” instances. We are working on adding support for these alternative, discounted instance types as a high priority. However, you can still take advantage of Preemptible/Spot instance types by launching them manually.
re: 3dsMax in the cloud. I really like the export to *.vrscene from 3dsMax workflow, which removes any Windows/3dsMax/3rd party plugin dependency and render in the cloud using Linux & VRay Standalone (your VRay v3.x license covers you for all VRay render node apps) and just worry about transferring any external asset files that the *.vrscene file needs, such as textures, geo, etc.
+1 for exporting vrscene files and rendering with vray standalone.
with vray 3.0, as long as you’re connecting your local network to the cloud network with a VPN, you can share your licenses, and vray 3.0 render licenses apply to any vray render, not just the one you have the interactive license for. So you could set up a farm of vray standalone renderers on a linux farm, export your vrscene files and submit those to the cloud.
one thing you’re going to deal with are syncing assets. we have a pre-render job that calls rsync to move all assets for the given render file to the cloud, with the actual render job having a dependancey on the rsync job, so the render doesn’t go off until the rsync is done. You’ll want to write an asset crawler in maxscript or blur python to crawl your scene for all assets (textures, alembic caches, etc.) and pass those on as assets for the rsync job. I also have them listed as asset dependencies on the render job…a safety net in case the rsync goes sideways, the render job wont complete if the assets aren’t present.
Good luck!
p.s. we’ve found the google folks to be very helpful. almost as helpful as the thinkbox folks.
One of our customers was using VRay Standalone on Linux for rendering on the cloud, but switched back to VRay for 3DS Max on Windows instances. Some of their points for switching back included: Keeping the scene working in both VRay versions required a great deal of effort; The additional control offered by the Deadline SMTD plugin made life easier; Better task progress reporting in Monitor; and with 3DS Max the scene stays loaded between frames.
Of course, it all depends on a studio’s workflow. If the above points were not issues for a given pipeline, then VRay Standalone could be the better approach.
