Rays FAQ

  1. What is this service about?

    The service is about CGI rendering. It allows users to render Blender files using Cycles engine on hundreds and thousands of GPUs.
  2. How can I use the service?

    You must register with email or social network account, upload your .blend file, select options for rendering, prepay rendering with the calculated price and download rendered frames as one zip-file. It’s simple :)

    The unique feature of the service is that simplicity and speed. You don’t have to manually setup hundreds of workers and orchestrate them, this is done automatically.

  3. What hardware is used?

    The minimal node hardware is 6x NVidia Geforce 1080 Ti GPUs, 32 GB RAM, Intel i5 CPU, 120 GB SSD.

  4. What Blender versions are supported?

    We support all versions up to 2.80 release. 2.80 version files are rendered by 2.80 release build Blender version, 2.79 and earlier version files are rendered by 2.79 nightly build version.
  5. What are the limits for .blend files?

    At the moment the maximum size of file is 2.5 GB. This limit can be increased, stay tuned :)

    .blend files with 2.80 nightly builds and earlier version are supported.

    Only blend files with packed data are supported, you can’t use linked files.

    Your rendering frames should fit NVidia GeForce 1080 Ti and 32 GB system RAM to be rendered.

  6. Which resolutions are supported?

    We support up to 20 000 x 20 000 images.

  7. Which output file formats are supported?

    All output formats are supported. You will get results in format you've set in Blender settings.
  8. Do you support Blender plugins?

    At the moment no plugins are supported. The official plugins distributed with Blender will be supported soon, stay tuned.
  9. Do you support baking physics, smoke, fire, etc?

    The service will not do baking automatically.

    The service doesn’t support uploading extra files that are not packed into .blend files.

    So if you manage to bake everything into .blend file that will be not more than 2,5GB in size, then we will succeed.

  10. What is the price?

    The price is 0.004 USD/ OB/h.

    This is roughly equal to 0.5 USD/hour on Nvidia GeForce 1070 and 0.75 USD/hour on NVidia GeForce 1080Ti.

    The minimum price of one frame is 0.02 USD.

    The minimum price of one task is 1 USD.

  11. How the service is payed?

    Each and every rendering job is charged separately. The price for the job is fixed beforehand and the job is 100% prepayed.

    You can pay with credit card. The minimum credit card payment is 1 USD.

    You can also pay with bonuses. Bonuses are awarded for early adopters and referral program participants.

    Also if you stop and delete incomplete job, you will be refunded with bonuses for the frames that were not processed.

  12. Can I get USD for my bonuses?

    No, you can only spend bonuses for new render jobs at our service.

  13. What is analysing about?

    Analysing is the process of fast rendering your file with low quality in order to estimate the final price for rendering.

    Rays cuts off the risk of overspending the customer’s budget. The rendering price is fixed before rendering starts and will never change. To be able to offer customer this fixed price we have to run this analysing process. It’s more than 100x times faster than real rendering and it’s completely free of charge.

    This cutting edge feature guarantees that you will get the expected results within a predefined budget. No more “deposit” extra “tokens” to be sure that you will finish your job! No more payments for “test” runs in order to estimate the budget yourself! This is a unique feature of our service.

  14. I expected rendering costs at X, but analysis show me Y

    Cost estimating is a complex process. The final price depends on both scene complexity and network load, so it can vary. Just like Uber :)

  15. How can I prepare my .blend file for uploading?

    Ensure that you’ve chosen Cycles engine and set up your scene and object properties for Cycles.

    Pack all your data in .blend file using File -> External data -> Pack all into blend.

    blend file packing.

    Warning! Some data could not be packed into .blend file, check Blender documentation. Such options are not supported at the moment, watch for the .zip file support feature to be implemented (Sep 2019 approx).

  16. How can I download rendered images?

    After the job is complete you can download all rendered frames in one zip file. You can also download image files one-by-one as soon as they are rendered.

  17. Can I view rendered images before the job is complete?

    Yes, as soon as frame image is rendered, it becomes available for you both as a low resolution preview on web, and a downloadable full quality image file.
  18. Can I stop the job before it is complete? For example, I noticed some errors in source .blend file.

    Yes you can. You can pause and continue the job at any moment, note that all processing frames will not be stopped immediately, but will be finished. When you delete the incomplete job, you will receive a “cacheback” with bonuses for not rendered frames.
  19. How can I contact support team?

    Use online assistant or https://t.me/RaysRender Telegram chat