Chaos Cloud service designed to slash render times and keep things simple
Chaos Group, the developer of V-Ray, is looking to take the complexity out of cloud rendering with a new ‘one click’ rendering service. Chaos Cloud is available now for V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino, Cinema 4D, Revit, Modo, Houdini [beta] and SketchUp (Next and 3.6 editions).
According to the developers, artists can now easily render an entire animation in the time it takes to render a single frame, without having to track assets, manage licenses or set up virtual machines. Chaos Cloud also removes the need to pack scenes, says Chaos Group, a laborious process that required artists to manually assemble bitmaps, scripts and plugins every time they wanted to render to the cloud. Now, this all happens automatically.
The service includes a number of ‘smart features’ designed to remove the complexity commonly associated with cloud rendering.
SmartSync means data only needs to be uploaded once to the Chaos Cloud. After that, only the parts of a scene that change will need to be resynced, keeping upload times to a minimum.
SmartVault is a secure database where all data uploaded through Chaos Cloud is stored for easy recall and additional renders. The developers explain that SmartVault keeps track of asset “fingerprints,” so they never need to be uploaded again – regardless of how they’re named, what scene they’re used in or where they’re stored locally.
Since the Chaos Cloud interface is entirely browser-based, artists can also control it from almost any device, including a smartphone. With Live View and Remote Control, users can monitor progress, preview images, pause or even cancel renders from anywhere with an internet connection.
While V-Ray rendering is the first offering on the Chaos Cloud, plans are already underway for Corona Renderer and Phoenix FD. In the future, Chaos Cloud will also add compatibility for distributed and GPU rendering, promising even faster speeds.
To use Chaos Cloud, customers purchase packages of credits, which are available with volume discounts. Right now, packages begin at $100 for 100 credits and prices go as low as 55 cents per credit for larger packages. Upon sign-up, every user will get 20 free credits. Since every scene is different, Chaos Group has also compiled a gallery of samples to help see how render times and credit cost vary by scene.
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