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Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality

38 points by dasokol112358 ↗ HN
Hi HN,

My name is David Sokol, and I'm the founder of rentaflop (https://rentaflop.com). We're a crowdsourced render farm aimed at making Blender rendering fast and affordable.

If you've used Blender, then I'm sure you've experienced the pain of waiting around for your animations to render. You've probably even had to sacrifice the quality of your work to reduce your render times. I've been there too.

If you're like me, then you're also disappointed with the alternative solutions: spending thousands of dollars on graphics cards or using prohibitively expensive cloud render farms to get fast render times. Our solution to this dilemma is to leverage low opportunity cost hardware from around the world to allow Blender artists to render their projects quickly, affordably, and without compromising on quality. Since most graphics card owners aren't utilizing their hardware to do valuable work 24/7, we provide them with a way to make money without lifting a finger, while lowering the cost curve for 3D rendering.

We're currently doing a private beta. If you'd like to get early access, check out our site (https://rentaflop.com) and join the waitlist. If you're a graphics card owner who wants to help Blender artists while earning money, reach out to support@rentaflop.com and we'll help you get set up.

Please leave a comment below, we'd love to hear your thoughts :)

25 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] thread
tomc1985
What are the incentives for allowing Rentaflop to use your hardware? A substancial/majority cut of the proceeds, I hope?
dasokol112358
Yes, folks who add their hardware to the rentaflop network get 90% of the money earned through their rendering. Many of our hardware owners are cryptocurrency miners, so they'll make more money by completing rendering tasks with us. Did you know rendering jobs are worth ~10x more than mining Ethereum?
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Rovoska
Disappointing that this is just a crypto miner with a fancy hat. Instant pass.
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dasokol112358
Many of our early hardware providers (hosts) are crypto miners, as they often have many graphics cards. As a result, we pay our hosts in crypto in order to attract them to our network. We understand your concern about crypto mining, so we've added the option to disable the background crypto miner that runs when there aren't render jobs happening. It's also on our roadmap to offer payments to hosts in USD so that hardware owners who aren't interested in crypto can still participate.
egypturnash
What’s your policy on porn? I know of a lot of people whose main rendering bottleneck is, ah, fluid simulation.

Are you still also a crypto mining operation, as per the “rentaflop miner” link in the “product” section of your footer?

dasokol112358
Currently, the only limitation we have on what users can render is that it must be legal. The rendering, for instance, must not incorporate real images of child pornography.

To answer your second question, rentaflop miner is our product for hardware providers (hosts). It has an optionally-enabled feature allowing it to mine cryptocurrency when it's not processing any rendering jobs, but it's primary purpose is to provide rendering to our network.

wodenokoto
I think it is a reasonable question, given how many online services have problem serving this segment, either due to CC not allowing them, or just because they don't want to be seen as a service for smut.
pvg
If you'd like to get early access, check out our site (https://rentaflop.com) and join the waitlist.

Show HN is for things that can be tried by HN users and signups can't be Show HNs. Take a look at

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

dasokol112358
Thanks for pointing that out, will keep that in mind in the future!

I didn't make it clear in the post, but our product for hardware providers is available for use right now. Here's the link in case anyone wants to try it out: https://portal.rentaflop.com/blog/hosting

belval
A profitability calculator on your website would help. The page here: https://portal.rentaflop.com/blog/hosting seems to imply that you are taking a cut from the regular ETH miner embedded with the rentaflop worker. You mind want to rephrase so that it's clear that:

- Your are offering a miner software which will occasionally work on blender renders which are more profitable to the miner than regular ETH mining.

- That your miner does not take a cut of the ETH mining part of the equation.

The idea is pretty cool though! The timing is simply unfortunate as there is a significant increase in (probably rightful) crypto skepticism right now.

Best of luck!

dasokol112358
That's a great suggestion! A profitability calculator for hosts is on our roadmap and will be coming soon.

Thanks for the suggestion for rewording the hosting page, we'll get that fixed to clarify things.

81378ecb
Do you have a comparison to the sheepit render farm?

https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home

dasokol112358
We've tried sheepit. Love the project, especially as you can do free rendering on it. One of the drawbacks of sheepit is that you must provide your own hardware to render others' projects prior to being permitted to render your own projects. Rentaflop, while it costs money, doesn't have this limitation and is faster while being significantly cheaper (~50% less) than most other cloud render farms.
TrevorFSmith
I'd love to use this service if it was offered without crypto mining and it didn't pay hosts in Ethereum. A community Blender farm could be nice. One that mostly mines coins is not for me.
dasokol112358
We understand that the crypto payouts aren't for everyone. We started with crypto since many of the hardware owners on our network are crypto miners with multiple graphics cards, but it's on our roadmap to offer payouts in USD in the near future!
MCOfficer
I feel bad for hijacking this post, but there is a fully community-driven renderfarm: https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/

Disclaimer: I'm a contributor and moderator to Sheepit.

pmx
I've just started using sheepit and I love it. I rendered a project in 15 minutes that took 7 hours on my own hardware. Now I just leave my windows PC running jobs from sheepit to build up my points and in two days I'm already well in the green.
f0e4c2f7
This seems great! Would it be possible to add support for unreal engine renders one day?
cyberjunkie
Read crypto and I'm out.

Sorry, but I think that movement has stolen enough GPUs (and enjoyable / productive time) from creative artists and gamers over the years.

atoav
As a VFX freelancer who is now in education I really want to stress the value of optimizing your renders. If things are far away, prerender them and replace them with billboards, if you have a lot of duplicate gemoetry clone them using alt+d instead of shift+d or use geometry nodes/particles. Think about how many samples must be used where. Do test renders with the workbench renderer to judge the speed and timing before doing the final thing.

The energy we put into animations is real. Going from 150 samples to 200 will maybe reduce the noise in a tiny portion of the image a little bit, but the energy and time used for it is real. After a certain threshold every kWh you spend is spent on very subtle improvements.

With my students I can typically reduce render times by factor 10 just by selecting the right settings and using details where it matters instead of everywhere. A render that would take two weeks on their machine would then be done in 36 hours.

Independent of the resources you use (e.g. a crowdsourced renderfarm) these optimizations should be done.

Meltion3
I find it very dishonest that the mining aspect is 'hidden'.

I don't want to support crypto.

freemint
WOW, unless i have a mistake in my math there is a 90% profit margin. A 3090 has 650ish octabench score.[1] I can get a 3090 for $0.162/hr at vast.ai (ok it's the cheapest one). 0.162/651.95 = 0.00024848531 << $0.0019 pricing taken from https://portal.rentaflop.com/pricing

Am i missing something?

[1] https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/summary_detail_item.php?...

cmeacham98
Yes, you're missing the part where that instance has

1. Garbage internet speeds (~20Mbps symmetrical)

2. 97% reliability (which, if I understand correctly, means a 3% chance of your task just randomly getting dropped part way through)

3. An ancient CPU (admittedly, it was really good in 2014)

The next cheapest 3090 is about 25% more expensive, and the next after that another 25% - presumably rentaflop has more than 1 customer at a time. Within about 10-15 GPUs on vast.ai the price is literally double. And of course, you're paying for the convenience of them just doing the render for you, rather than having to deal with getting dropped in a docker container.