Yes, I always insist - please contact me for a trial account. This is on the understanding of a one or two images are sent to the server and small enough to be completed in 10-15 minutes. It's there to purely check your upload speed, the server, etc.
Sadly there are regular instances of people 'trying it out' and just rendering 20+ images. I have started to log IP's, but this is not in the spirit of it.
Please email me - and give me an idea of your typical/expected usage (are rendering a few larger images, or lots of smaller, quicker ones?)
Please report it on the Support Page
Yes, but due to the nature of it you need to use one of my dedicated servers, which is priced per hour (as its for your individual use). Please email me to discuss, as I'm happy to do hourly/daily/weekly or longer rentals with discounts for extended use.
Please just email me and let me know. It's becoming increasingly normal for people to just stop paying without any sort of communication (even after reminders are sent out). It's incredibly frustrating, and to be honest I'm getting tired of sending reminders. If the invoice is outstanding after a few weeks, I'll just delete the account. Please bear that in mind if you then ask to sign up again.
If you continue to use the server while ignoring any payment reminders, I will delete the account and then look to recover the outstanding usage at cost of $0.50 per minute.
There are two servers, port 9090 and 7070. As per the specs, 9090 is the beefier of the two. If you have a bigger job, please try and use that one first - it will run a lot faster. If it's a small job, then 7070 is fine.
Please use one or the other, but not both at the same time. If you use one, don't also submit your other jobs to the second server. The expectation is that if one goes down, one will stay up until I can reboot it. If a job is submitted that causes a problem, don't upload it to the other one and take that down too.
Please set a reasonable time limit on your jobs. Should the server drop to CPU, it will ensure the render doesn't jam the server up. 3600 seconds should be fine for most jobs, and if you need to resubmit (if it's grainy) then a maximum of 7200.
Please try to limit the number of jobs submitted concurrently. If they are rendering in less than 10 minutes per frame, then you may upload in small batches (no more than 5 please) but do bear in mind that I might have to clear the cache - which means the queue will then also have to be cleared. So adding a lot of jobs risks losing all of those in the queue
Some people upload a lot of small images which render quickly, some just upload single images that take a while, please respect other users.
If you have used the server for a prolonged period and see other jobs stacking behind it, feel free to adjust the priority to 101+ so other jobs render first.
Most people understand, but I've had a couple of people recently who think that their monthly subscription comes with a 100% job completion/uptime guarantee and I wanted to address this.
The server it prone to crashing when it encounters 'weird' jobs (heavy scenes, high sub-d settings) and that is out of my control. All I can do is reboot the machine, but if this is during the night, then it won't be until the next day. If you happen to upload a job which kills the server, and then upload the same job to the other server it will also take that offline and there is nothing I can do to stop that.
So please bear in mind, that there might be times where one or both servers are offline for a few hours. I make no guarantees, and they may be times where you upload a job which is too 'big' for the server and all I can is delete it.
Render Settings
There are a number of users who submit jobs and either remove or set impossibly high render settings.
For those unaware, Iray uses these settings to determine when to stop rendering. Either it meets the number of iterations, time limit or quality.. or whatever those that are set.
So if you have an large image, which is set to 15000 iterations, no time limit, or no quality, that image will render until that iteration limit is met, regardless if it is 20 mins or 20 hours. Obviously, this is an easy way to bog the server down, particularly if busy.
This also causes a potential problem if the job drops from the GPU to CPU rendering - that means it's going to be glacial trying to render that and essentially it's just locked the server up until either I know, or am alerted. This then creates a backlog, and then the cache issue comes into play as well.
So please can I suggest we look to be more efficient with these. I appreciate some shots will need more samples, but huge renders with quality and time settings disabled are a little overkill. Ideally I'd like to see everyone set a time limit of an hour (so 3600 seconds) a quality of 1 and 15000 iterations. If these settings produce noisy renders, then adjust, but pay attention to the results - if the render stopped after 20 mins as it hit the iteration limit, then just increase that. Don't just max everything out please.
Also please consider your render resolution - a lot are now being rendered 3000+ pixels, which is ok if you keep the other settings manageable. I do it myself, and then resample down, but now it just seems everything is getting set to max, huge scenes, huge resolutions.. and it's impacting everyone else.
Render Quantity
Please be mindful of others - some people use it more than others, so if you see 1 job behind your 5+ please consider just setting your priority to 101+ to let others go first (but again, bear in mind if you load up a lot of renders, they could be culled in a cache clear out)
Please also refer to the Terms of Service section for further details