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Cost estimation

Workflow

Before submitting a project, we recommend you evaluate its rendering duration and cost with the help of our Cost Estimator.

  1. Select the software, its release and the renderer you used
  2. Indicate the CB R15 or OctaneBench score performance
  3. Enter the number of frames of your animation in the first field.
  4. Enter the average Render Time par image sur votre ordinateur
  5. Click on Estimate Time/Cost.

This tool does a reasonably good job of approximating the render time for animations, with a margin of error of +/-20%, however it remains an estimation, and not a guarantee.

The time and cost displayed by this cost estimator correspond to the rendering phase of the project. The total processing time of a project includes the management time (deployment of the scene and its elements across the whole RANCH, the loading scene time, the render time itself, ftp account creation, etc).

Estimator accuracy

Make sure that the value you enter for the render time on your system is really an average render time per frame, and not the render time of a random frame (which may be considerably lower than the average).

The estimator accuracy is proportional to :

  1. The precision of the average render time per frame or the homogeneity of your images
  2. The CPU/GPU usage

In others words, the estimated render time will be more closer to the reality if 1) all images required the same processing time, and 2) all the processors cores or graphic cards on each nodes run at 100% during the rendering the project.

For more safety, we recommend that you enter the calculation time of the longest frames of your animation, or ideally, submit a few test frames.

Tips for a more precise estimation

For an Animation (starting from 2 frames)

Send a test on a few significants frames, the number of images depends on the length of your animation. Usually, between 3 to 15 images.

Imagine you have an animation of 500 frames with a render time per frame of 2min at the start, 15 min ato 2/3 and 10 min at the end. Therefore, we recommend to send 5 to 7 images, for example the frames: 1, 165, 250, 333 and 500.

For still images

There are 2 ways to estimate the rendering cost and time.

  1. Use our online estimator with the renderer estimation as a basis

Warning: the estimated time indicated on your computer can change while the image rendered.
For instance, after 10 minutes of rendering on your machine, the software indicates a total duration of 23 hours. Thus you stop this rendering and enter this data in our cost estimator.
But if the rendering had not been stopped, 30 minutes later, the software would have indicated a total duration of 30 hours, based on the difficulties of the image. As a consequence the time estimation (and subsequently the cost) given by the estimator would be biased.

  1. Send an image in low resolution

Warning: this method will only work if you keep the lenght/width ratio and will lost some precision if the difference between images size is too important. Moreover, the rendering time indicated in the project report include the scene opening time.

If you try to render in ¼ of the final resolution, you must not multiply by 4 the render time and cost to estimate your project but by 4² (so by 16) because the final resolution images will be divided by 4 in length and in 4 in width.

For more accuracy, send your image in 3 different resolutions. Then, watch the time progression curve depending of the resolution (linear progression, exponential…) and et déduce the time / cost of final resolution image based on seen progress curve.

Note : there are others solutions to estimate the rendering time of still images created with unbiased renderer like Maxwell Render or Indigo (see specific sections).
For MultiBand rendering (3ds Max, C4D), consider that the RANCH will be between 50 to 100 time faster than your computer.

Never do an animation estimation (time/cost) based on a still images ! The result would not be relevant.