Anybody using a Mac Pro to render? Or offload to cloud farm?

[Anonymous]

Hi all;
We've been getting into Cinerender quite a bit and notice the limits of our Macbook Pro. Is anybody using the Mac Pro or iMacs to render scenes in AC? If so, is the speed of the renders a lot faster? Also, anybody using remote render farms to render Cinema 4D export files? We're trying to figure out what the best approach is to get images cranked out faster.
Thx in advance.

[alemanda]

I'm going through Cinerender as well and I would say that you (but me too) are facing the limit of cinerender ... it's so slow

Cinerender is a big improvement in the workflow because you don't need to export into another software ... but I think we AC users need a faster and much less complicated engine (how many parameters are in cinerender senttings???) for more fast production renderings...

[Anonymous]

I would disagree about the speed. I attached an image that was originally 11x17 and took about 1hr.

I think its fast and you need to set settings correctly.

You cannot make a 24"x36" Rendering in 1 minute. IES lights, special effects, and grass will make the renderings much slower.

Never render the entire scene or model, use the marquee to minimize the scene as needed.

From my understanding Cinerender is basically Cinema4D version 13 or 14 engine modified.

If you want to farm out your renderings then buy Cinema4D to farm them out. If you buy studio you can use an unlimited amount of computers to render your scene, even better make cool animations.
https://www.youtube.com/user/VGoDzB

alemanda wrote:
I'm going through Cinerender as well and I would say that you (but me too) are facing the limit of cinerender ... it's so slow

Cinerender is a big improvement in the workflow because you don't need to export into another software ... but I think we AC users need a faster and much less complicated engine (how many parameters are in cinerender senttings???) for more fast production renderings...

[Anonymous]

We've got some new iMac's 5K and a Mac Pro. The Pro was bought in order to do the heavy rendering work but I'm quite disappointed. Not much quicker than the iMacs...

[Anonymous]

My office just bought 2 new mac pros as rendering stations. Unfortunately there is no performance enhancement, much to our disappointment. We each use new 15" macbook pros, but wanted rendering stations too to lift the burden on on the laptops. I can honestly say that the laptops actually render faster (using cinerender). Note...this is really for stills, not animations, and no I haven't done anything scientific with testing this other than running the same scene on both computers at the same time. Graphisoft claims to have optimized it to use all of the cores, and while the activity monitor says they're all running on full steam, there' no actual benefit.

[Erwin Edel]

I am far from a hardware expert, but I think the general opinion around the web is that the new 'trashcan' mac pro models offer awesome performance for the small form factor, rather than being a top of the line workstation. I think they're using 'outdated' Xeons, compared to some of the competition. Very sleek design, of course

I've heard of people using say a 2010-ish mac pro and getting a brand new one and having the same render times with cinema 4D. Since cinerender is based off that, the performance would be about the same.

It's a shame, I really like apple computers and OSX, but even the 5k iMac is a bit of blow to performance compared to the 'old' 2.5k screen model, just trying to render all those pixels on your screen.

The HP420z workstation I have here running intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 @ 3.70 GHz is doing that great in cinebench either, compared to some i7 processors out there.

You expect to have a workhorse, but it seems that the workstation processors aren't that much better than the top of the line i7s.

[Erwin Edel]

Oh and max out the RAM on those workstations, that would make a huge difference in performance over the laptop models. At least I don't think macbooks can have 128gb of RAM