DAZ Studio Cloud
MaxHancock
Posts: 227
Found this under the advance tab. Does anyone know what the Cloud tab for? Can I render remotely, like a render farm?
Post edited by MaxHancock on
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I believe that's the intention, though I don't think it's entirely implemented at the moment - at least, I haven't heard anyone using it yet.
It should be noted that nVidia's cloud service is NOT free. It is subscription and usage based at the moment, and looks to be quite pricey. But yes, in theory (if those parameters are even hooked up inside DS), you could put your Iray Cloud server and login information in, and when you render, it would upload the scene and render it on nVidia's servers with VCAs (i.e., lots of high-end nVidia cards in a box).
Yes, they do seem to be overpriced. :( however, if I had a large project that could cover the cost, it might be worth it. From Nividia, I found this:
http://www.nvidia-arc.com/partners/migenius.html
https://www.bloomunit.com/en/
Actually 10 hours for $30 isn't really that expensive. I doubt if most people here could even use 10 hours of render time a month unless they were doing a bunch of large test renders there. Don't forget that the time would be much faster than we would get on a home machine.
Bloomunit is only sketchUp supported currently, although I spoke with the CEO there and he said that if DAZ offers a bridge or VCA to open support then there's the potential for using their service in the future.
3delights base render engine is renderman Techology. & the Pixar tractor render farm https://renderman.pixar.com/view/pixars-tractor allows Users of Blender, Maya, 3DS Max, c4d to access their render farms per subscriptions cloud., There is a Python Script that allows poser users to use Pixar tractor with Super fly rendering through the poser fusion plugin ( not sure how that works). I have no idea if someone could get pixar render farm to connect with daz studio software .. But boy if you could think of the possibilities :)
I'm done with 3Delight. iRay or Octane or Arnold is the future!
Here is another thread on the same topic. It looks like DAZ Cloud isn't ready for the masses yet.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/55886/daz-iray-cloud
I was pointed to this as a possible cloud rendering solution:
https://www.nimbix.net
On the web page it explains that Renderman tractor is a proprietary GPU rendering render farm available for the Public. its what Pixar & Disney use to render their animation. you can't buy Renderman like a Nivida Graphic card. But now its available for the Public to rent time on the Pixar render farm. you have to have a 3d software that can read Python to use it.
Anyway unless your rendering story animation, I would not see a reason for paying a render farm to do still rendering & if your rendering animation with Iray or any GPU render engine like Octane or Reality , then I would think a render farm would be desired other wise your looking at a very long times to complete a few second scene in HD. I dunno if you have tried rendering any type of animation with Iray in 1080hd, But my experience has been I would dead and buried before a 10 seconds scene would be done rendering..lol . I have 2 -EVGA 980 ti cards, that work great for iray. But i would not plan a animation short story using them as my rendering option., so for me because I uses daz studio to render story animation . 3delight is stlll the best tool for the job until the technology catches up for quicker GPU rendering . I don't have years to render out a animation in Iray, ..lol
I can see plenty of people who render for a large print size thinking that using a render farm for a couple of minutes vs having Studio busy for a couple of hours is a good thing. Pretty much anyone who ends up using a batch render set up would think it was worth it much of the time.
Yea your right Kory & especially if you were doing larger projects that require a lot of people accessing the same files.. I did think of that after i posted my comment. :)
...like the scenes I create.
My railway station scene has become almost too big for my system. As I my GPU has only 1 GB of memory, I have to render in CPU/memory mode. Just loading the scene takes ten to fifteen minutes and is extremely sluggish in OpenGL. Rendering at only 1,600 x 1,200 it takes over forty minutes just to perform the initial calculations before rendering actually commences and the process takes about an additional five hours at that size. I cannot imagine rendering it at a larger high quality resolution for a gallery print on my 4 year old system.
You can also use game engines like Unity 3D or Unreal to make an animation in real time.
For me it is more intuitive, when I can just walk the characters and then add some special effects
like particle, postprocessing all in the same program. I have already used Unity 3D for making
animation and I like the results. Morph3D, a division of Daz3D has already models converted
for use with Unity, if you do not want to transfer the necessary figures from Daz Studio yourself.
With further advances of both hardware and software the results looks pretty amazing.
Take a look at Nvidia recent presentation:
Thank you for sharing. I was somewhat expecting that sooner or later Nvidia will offer a cloud render service to DAZ Studio users.
This could be very interesting when you want to
- pay a small amount of money so an image finishes in just a few minutes with 100+ GPU rented over the cloud.
- render a client project that needs to be done asap
- have an animation project rendered in less than an hour instead of letting the workstation run for two to three weeks.
@ prices comparison
Some people are expecting that OctaneRender Cloud ORC will be ready together with the official OctaneRender 3 release at the end of Mai 2016.
Nevertheless so far you can only find limited information about the prices:
Source:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=53458
for more information about ORC compare:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=100
OctaneBench to check the performance of your local GPU and get your OctaneBench Score:
https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/
- - -
As far as is known by now you can subscribe for OctaneRender Cloud for $ 9.99 a month.
For that 10$ you get OctaneRender credits each month that you can use to render your projects.
If you need a lot more render time you can purchase additonal render credits.
-> Hopefully this will all be more clear in a few weeks.
- - -
@ local rendering vs cloud rendering
Cloud Rendering is not ment to completly replace your personal local graphic cards. It is ment as an affordable solution when you are facing time restrictions.
In the past highly motivated freelancers or some studios have purchased 4-12 GPU to render locally.
Depending on your render needs it might actually be cheaper to only purchase 2 GPU to render locally and using cloud render solutions for more urgent projects.
Keep in mind that in the next few years GPU development might keep improving. Upgrading 4-12 GPU every year might become more expensive than using a combination of 2 GPU locally and a cloud render service.
- - -
For anyone doing "IT Farming" to find your actual costs: Divide 1000 by the WATTs used by your GPU card(s) use. That is how quickly your GPU will hit 1 kw/hour of use. Now, Divide 1000 by the WATTs used by your CPU and add that to the GPU watts. Most electricity bills are done in kw/hour increments. Most GPU cards list the watts used on the manufacturer's website. CPUs are the same. SO: if the GPU uses 195W (GT-680) and the CPU uses 179W (i7-3969x) then your usage is = 1000/374 wich is a 1 Kw/hr use in 2.6 hours.
If your electric company charges $.11 per kwh then it costs you about 4 cents/hour to render for CPU+GPU. This doesn't account for motherboard or monitors.
Kendall
Greetings,
Just a thought; $30/mo. for 10 hours of high-speed rendering farm access might just be dirt cheap for PA's wanting a fast solution to hand off promo renders. Essentially you could fire off a render, then set up for the next render while the farm processes it.
Sure, commissions and commercial work are the obvious targets, but I'd think that $30/mo. would be a decent price for PA's looking to optimize their time-to-promo.
-- Morgan
$30 is dirt cheap if you want to render animation using Iray materials as well just the time saved with rendering animation using a render farm would be worth it to me. I wonder how long it take a render farm to render out a 30 minute 1080 HD IRAY animation? I bet the results would be Killa
Except this doesn't take into consideration the loss in the power supply conversion, which can vary, and other components that are harder to guestimate. A simple and inexpensive watt meter answers all these questions pretty well:
http://www.amazon.com/P3-P4400-Electricity-Usage-Monitor/dp/B00009MDBU
For the hobbyist, I don't see much benefit of render farms unless they're billed out very cheaply, which is possible for off-peak -- good for when you're not in a hurry. From a professional standpoint, the biggest cost is opportunity, the money you lose because an in-house machine is tied up doing renders. So here, farming can be very cost productive, IF there's a convenient means to take advantage of it. I've chatted off and on with a major player in the CPU/GPU cloud farm biz, and it comes down to numbers. D|S is too small of a market for them, but the combination of Maya, Cinema 4D, 3DS, D|S (when it's ready for it), and perhaps some future "big game" app like Photoshop3D, will convince more players to jump in.
$30 for 10 hours sounds great to me. Only snag is my DSL upstream bandwdith. If there was a way to have the cloud service download the content from DAZ, that would be really amazing.
I was trying to not "glaze over" the eyes of the reader by getting into too much. I was deliberatley "low-balling" just the two main components that have easy to determine draws to illustrate the base costs of rendering in the first place.
Kendall
Coming to this convo late because I'm trying to grok how this works and how it might possibly apply to DAZ in the future. I've looked at the iray cloud prices, and $30 isn't anywhere near what they seem to be offering to charge. It's closer to $300 a year - and it sounds like a yearly charge - which would be $25 a month... except it's per year. Both prices hurt my little wallet. For $300 I could go and get a better video card than I have now and be much happier.
But I also acknowledge I'm just trying to undertand this. For example, I've not really gotten most of what is said here. I would very much like a solution like this because as much as I would like to buy better equipment and have a render house that rivals Pixar I'm a little broke at the moment. Perhaps there's a cloud rendering for dummies tut somewhere, something that uses words a dummy can get as they try to learn and improve?
Depending on your network bandwidth and the size of your scenes, and the details of the cloud operation, punting your render to the cloud could be excruciatingly slow. At least, for the first render with those assets.
@ general solution to reduce bandwith before rendering
Basically we are headed towards a future where all your project files are "in the cloud" anyway so you can access them from multiple pc or laptops wherever you are.
Basically while you are working locally the project is continually updated on the cloud.
Some cloud render solutions seem to actually rely on mainstream cloud storage like drop box that then can be accessed directly by the render service which is located on the same server...
@ how cloud rendering could work with DAZ Studio
All DAZ3D would need to do is put their whole product catalogue on a server that can be accessed by the Nvidia Cloud render system.
The only bandwith heavy assets that would need to be uploaded before rendering are custom models created by the user.
For most standard DAZ Studio renders all that would need to be uploaded to the cloud render service are the few MB of a .duf scene file that only includes the references to the assets allready located on the cloud.
Well we will see how it will work exactly when or if we get there...
- - -
I am interested in the concept and $30 a month seems reasonable.... it would be great to give my CPU a rest instead of running too much to complete a render (I don't have an Nvidia graphics card). I worry about it overheating or getting damaged from CPU renders. One thing to note about having DAZ upload their entire catalog to some cloud is that alot of our content is from other 3D stores and could be part of our Iray rendering.
Are render farms that much faster in reality? And is that price for real time or processor time?
In other words, is it a shared system?
I remember renting time on the university mainframe, it cost me something like $15,000 a minute. But since my programs used microseconds of processing time, my bill was in the neighborhood of $5.00 a month.
But sometimes it would take hours to run, because I was sharing that mainframe with many, many other users.
Are render farms the same? Will your renders be that much faster, or will they be slowed down because you're sharing the farm? A ten second render may be fast, but not so much if you have to wait in line for ten hours for the resources.
No. Just... no.
While I am not a six-figure artist with a worldwide fan base, my art, until ready for publication, is intensly personal and private. Never going on the cloud. I can't see commercial art doing the cloud-storage, access-anywhere thing either. Too many security risks, too many holes. This is why so many people and agencies do not allow their process computers to be connected online, ever, under any circumstances. Too much to lose, too easily.
nVidia seem to be leaning towards just providing the tools for 3rd parties to provide the Render farm services, not offering it themselves... yet.
By the way, the same tools are available to the public to make our own render farms on a home network. (its just called 'cloud' for marketing reasons)
I could set up some sort of DynDNS and give you an account on my Iray server, then you'd have all the power my 750ti.
I am aware that there is a vocal group of people who do not trust corporations, the internet and also any kind of service that has the word "cloud" in it.
The intention is not to argue with those who allready have made up their mind but to give some other point of view to those who may not be that familar with the topic.
@ security risks
There are security risks by using the internet. It may be very well possible none of our data is secure the moment any of our devices from mobile phone to personal computer connects online.
To put it that way: If a skilled person or entity wants access to our system they have it.
The question that needs to be asked in each case is:
Is the benefit of the technologies we use more worth than the possible risk we encounter by using them?
How likely is the chance that a random person can access the data and do harm with it?
@ projects based on non disclosure agreements
There are some very high profile projects that are under strict non disclosure agreements.
Some core parts of those projects may be rendered offline on workstations with no access to the internet.
Nevertheless, most high profile projects have companies from all over the world working together.
It cannot be helped that data must be shared between different locations.
If you have to share project data with partners all over the globe then that data needs to be on a server with acess to the internet.
The relevant question is:
Do you use your own servers or do you trust the services of the cloud storage providers?
@ standard projects
In most cases even for commercial projects the answer is:
Yes, we do trust Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Dropbox etc. to have enough security messures in place to keep the files save from random attacks.
The benefit of using cloud storage is that project files can be shared with partners in a conveniant way.
The risk is that a random person may gain access to the data.
The question is: What kind of harm can a random person do with our project files?
And the answer to that question is:
A random person very likely has no use at all for our computer graphic project files.
- - -
DS doesn't have the capability to use the Iray server to get to my 750ti, that was just a hypothetical. (I'm not using the Iray server via DS)
I expect DAZ are thinking hard before enabling that because its the same legalities of distributing files to out-of-house renderfarms as sending files to 3D print services.
Actually that opens up the field for a different business model - subscription based usage, something like an online library which provides unlimited access as long as the subscription is active. If you ever used Oreilly's Safari books online you know what I mean.
I have 3 Nvidia 780 6gb editions and i render my Iray scenes with HDRI lights in under 3 min. How is Cloud going to help us hobbiest do still renders. I think this is geared toward Pros and people with commerical needs or animations where time = money. Hobby users unless they have deep pockets will not use this. Now here is a thought! If Daz had a way for us users to sell our render capabilties with our cuda cores to other Daz users so they could speed up their renders that would be great. We could sell render time for credit at Daz store if you could meet the render requirements for that render. It would come in as a encrypted package (not viewable by you) and be rendered by your Cuda cards and go back to Daz where you would be credited for the render once it was done. On a side note, I hope Nvidia gets off their duff and makes the 1070 cheap and Iray capable soon! A 8gig of video ram Nvidia card for under $400 with lower power consuption sounds great.