Brainstorm - tell us your opinion on Render Farms

I send all my animations to Rebus. It saves so much time at an acceptable price that I send there most of my previews and test renders as well. It can easilly save you tens of hours at a price of few bucks and thanks to their one-click solution inside 3ds Max it's as simple as it can be. When it comes to animation then I wouldn't go back to local rendering again.

I have my own little render farm (have used squidnet and muster to render manage it) of 1 workstation and 4 slave servers to render on. For the really urgent stuff though, I have used rebus & garage farm. pricey option, but hey, very fast.

most render farms do a preview of your animation in 1/8 render size or something, and I think too few people ever do that themselves, they quickly render at full size, then come back the next day to realize it might take many days to finish. Run a small render through the whole sequence to get a test of it, plus know the areas that take the longest time to render. Sometimes a close shot or specific surfaces will take 10-100s of times longer than other frames, so its best to know where those areas are in an animation and optimize them first (or only them) instead of just reducing render settings for the whole animation. If your app allows it (I do this in modo), you can lower render settings in those frames or areas only, by key framing settings up and down (like depth of blur, AA passes, render quality, etc) since you don't always need those. Lots of ways to optimize a scene, specially in animation. But that still takes time and you have to compare to the render time to ever make it worthwhile.

most render farms do a preview of your animation in 1/8 render size or something, and I think too few people ever do that themselves, they quickly render at full size, then come back the next day to realize it might take many days to finish. Run a small render through the whole sequence to get a test of it, plus know the areas that take the longest time to render. Sometimes a close shot or specific surfaces will take 10-100s of times longer than other frames, so its best to know where those areas are in an animation and optimize them first (or only them) instead of just reducing render settings for the whole animation. If your app allows it (I do this in modo), you can lower render settings in those frames or areas only, by key framing settings up and down (like depth of blur, AA passes, render quality, etc) since you don't always need those. Lots of ways to optimize a scene, specially in animation. But that still takes time and you have to compare to the render time to ever make it worthwhile.