I also want to reinforce render.st is a great service I will useagain when I need to - absolutely no complaints. It was just that after doing the math on my current project I could buy a machine with the same funds, again, not because their service is too expensive, just because I need to do so much. Fortunately I have lots of solar power and so dont pay for electricity - right now my render rig is an extra heater for the house.
As suggested above, it will always be a personal equation and I didnt mean to fail to parse all the details about my render.
digitalcoleman: No worries, you were just presenting the facts that were relevant to the point you were making. I felt that more data was necessary for tomjscott to create a better picture of what render farms do, hence my previous post.
@RenderStreet
Hi, I am trying out a few render farms (shortlisted Rebus, RayPump and RenderSt)
Do you have a low resolution “preview” or “sample” option? I tried that on RayPump (10 stills @1280X1024 @500 samples max is for free each day) and it’s very useful for sampling my work before sending the final job.
-Christos
PS
I am now running a job as we speak with your 25$ promo, thank you.
Let me say I like the web interface and just loading a job as a batch. I am used to that because I have been doing a similar thing: rendering my sequences overnight with command line render. I have the frames with markers bound to cameras and rendering an “animation” means rendering a set of stills which is what I want in architectural visualization. I was going to program an input screen as a front for my batch jobs very much like the one you have!
The messaging information with the queue the expected time to completion, and expected cost are important and reassuring and you are above you competition with this part of the interface.
Tiled view as the render is progressing is also great!
@csimeon
Thanks for your kind words.
We do have an option to render in lower resolution, without needing to upload the file again. Just use the “add render job” page, clone your current job, and then set the sampling and resolution to lower ones for a test. Once you are sure it looks as expected, use the same process and set the sampling and resolution to the final one.
For faster response times, it’s best to use the support form on our site. While we monitor the forums and respond here as well, we are guaranteed to receive emails when contacted via the site support channels.
Yes you do monitor the forums and your response time here is great (good professionals!) 
Great help with the test procedure. Is there some form - minimal - of free testing?
The only kind of free testing is the one provided via the $25 signup bonus. The bonus will allow for more than 5 hours of rendering, so, if used properly, will allow for a lot of testing to be done.
Also, a lower resolution / samples test will only cost a few cents, so even when the bonus is finished it should be quite affordable.
Based on the information from here and other CG sites I shortlisted 3 farms to try out : RayPump, RenderSt and Rebus.
I must point out that I had no previous experiences with outsourcing renders. Also my test trials were short and limited and they are conveyed as such, maybe to help others once cross-referenced with others and compared to one’s own needs. I am an architect and usually I would be needing stills only, say anywhere from 5-20 for a project/competition.
My computer is an Windows 7/ i5-750 (quad-core) @ 2.67GHz/ GPU Gigabyte 760- 4GB RAM.
I had already tried out the project with my hardware. The scene(s) consist of 11 camera viewpoints that are bound to frame markers. This setup allows me to consecutively render the stills as frames of a (short) animation, and to do so outside interactive Blender, as command line batches (which I usually run overnight). Of course I can also select individual frames, at anytime. My “normal” quality I set to 2300X2300pixels @ 400 samples, for all frames - this prints well to sizes up to 20X20cm which was all I needed for this project. Times for any of the 11 frames, on my setup, varied only slightly between 1h5’ up to 1h10’, call it 70mins.
Time, price and interface were my demands for outsourcing, prioritized in that order. My findings will be limited use for animators since upload, queue and download time to them is less important than to me, since many frames make for better gains. Since I was given bonus points for signing up with all three, I used those and only did one frame to test. I upped resolution to see a more solid gain to 4000X4000 which is roughly 3 times the surface area and should be 3 times the time of my “normal” 2300X2300 > 3X70= 210mins = 3h30mins
I selected the cheapest option with all 3 services. Whatever that means for each.
- RayPump was both the fastest and cheapest : No queuing (maybe lucky moment…) 35min render time for 3.94€=5.52$
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RenderSt 5min queue, did the job up to 33% (which I then interrupted to save my free bonus points) at 38mins projected 114mins and projected cost, a nice feature is they show the cost as you render, 6.07€=8.50$
(I then tried a “normal” 2300X2300, one third the pixels expectedly for one third the cost turned out one third the time, despite enabling distributed rendering - at no extra cost) - Rebus was the slowest and most expensive: about 2h30min queue and about 1h30min render time, for 6.60€=9.25$
All were a pleasant surprise: in addition to time saved (more benefit in real scenario with many frames) the wonderful thing is my computer is not bogged down, leaving me to continue working without the slowing up of GPU rendering. All interfaces were quite easy and friendly. Some pros and cons
Raypump
- works with addon and a client manager installed on your machine. So projects are launched from inside Blender. Addon can be handled like any other addon
- Manager is easy and straight-forward
- Free! 10 stills each day, every day, 1280X1024px @ 500samples.(some intesity limitations apply, worked for me) Great for testing
- Excellent archiving scheme: I select a root and every project has a unique folder with all output.
RenderSt
- Loved the basic, webpage, interface. So much that I didn’t even try the addon. It’s just what I would have designed as a front end for my batch/command line rendering: Upload the file and choose thru dialog boxes which frames/samples/resolution. I need to find how to save/download to my choice folder.
- Web page interface and no client means I can leave my office and monitor progress from my tablet or phone at home. Includes a preview of tiled images! I can interrupt it from there too if it goes bad
Rebus
- Installs client manager application and modifies the Blender.exe to appear inside Blender. I don’t like that it modifies the exe instead of addon method. I don’t even know how to remove it.
- Inside blender it does a series of preliminary checks and warns about missing textures, resolution other than 100%, non ascii texture map names etc. Useful stuff.
Hope this helps. I am keeping all three in standby (well… you guess the order).
1 Like
You certainly took some time to do your testing 
Thanks for your kind words, I’m glad you liked our interface. We started designing it with simplicity in mind and I’m glad to hear that it’s doing exactly that. And I believe that our preview feature is unique at this moment as far as Blender render farms are concerned.
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Regarding the plugin: as you mentioned, we have our own plugin as well, and I believe that in your case you could have had the best of two worlds. More specifically, every job that is launched with the plugin can be tracked in the interface. So you can very well hit the launch button from Blender and then follow the progress from your tablet.
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Queue: the 5 minutes aren’t really a queue, as you didn’t have to wait for other jobs to finish. It’s just a time that’s necessary to analyze the file and to allocate the server to it, and it can be as low as 1 minute
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Regarding the rendering speed: our distributed rendering feature is more effective for complex images (several hours to days of rendering). The feature can be used for less complex renders, but the speed gain will vary.
Plus, even for still images, you can launch several in parallel, and they will be rendered simultaneously. So if you launched 10 jobs with the same image (as an example), it would have taken the same time to finish them all.
And of course the area where we shine is animations. We published a few figures on our blog, check out the one about highest acceleration
- Regarding pricing: at the Platinum level, the job you are referring to would have cost $5.66. It’s true that the Platinum level has a fixed fee, but it pays off for large projects.
In any case, I appreciate your review. And you don’t need to keep anything in standby, just come over when you have a job. We certainly have the capacity 
Nice review - thank you!
It should be useful for Blender users out there. Please keep testing/using/posting
I have been using render.st as well. Very good customer service and response time. Their interface and setup is easy too.
Have you tried using it with the current Blender 2.71? I couldn’t get the plugin to install via the Renderflow application
Have you tried it with the current version Blender 2.71? I couldn’t get the plugin to install via Renderflow application.
I tried it and nice smooth system, but the “free” limit of 300 samples & 1280 x 720 (not to mention other limits, naglogo, etc…) seems like it wouldn’t be of much use to a serious artist with a complex scene, unless they pay - but I can’t tell how many “points=amount of money spent” it would cost for higher samples and resolution. I even did a request for them to show an approximation, based on the specs in our .blend file.
I did a more “in depth” post on the “Brecht’s easter egg …” on page 727 in response to a post about it
[#14526](http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering&p=2682019&viewfull=1#post2682019) Raypump free version is a tease at 300 samples, 1280x720 & their logo on your render
Hi,
we are offer cycle renderservice too. We use tesla K20X cards with 6GB each. Plugin is still in development. Scenetransfer at the moment via ftp, wetransfer, dropbox or similar services. We offer 10 Euro testrendering. Price is 11 Euro per renderhour, you will get 1 node with 4x K20x 6GB for this. We can offer up to 7 nodes with this setup. Images up to 1000*1000 and up to 850 Cycles are free.
Baking via our plugin wil lbe supportet too. Please feel free to test us.
regards sven
You were the first to reply with “Render.st” and tons of people after confirmed. So thank you! I’m going to give it a shot.
Has anyone tested this for non commercial animation render farm, where you have no problem sharing your blend file with everyone:
Used RenderSt again, after almost a year (we were not rendering projects in the meantime). Some left over credit from a year ago was there and everything worked smoothly despite my having changed from Blender 2.69 to 2.73 in the meantime.
Again it was many times faster than my 760 GPU, and helped me deliver my presentation promptly.
Not having used it for a year, I greatly appreciated how simple the interface is ! I was using it in minutes.
Well, if you guys already necroposted, I hope I’m not harming anybody more…
Sheepit is fast and fully automated, but it requires you to render stuff for the farm (which can make it worthless if you have a weak PC/laptop) to get points which you use for rendering but is otherwise limitless for free.
If you want a FULLY free renderfarm, I’d recommend BURP, it’s a bit slow because every project has to be manually approved by an admin, but when it does it’s gonna be fast.
I have been using fox render farm as well. Very good customer service and response time. Their interface and setup is easy too.I like the $20 free trial