Maxwell Cloud

Open

Maxwell Cloud gives you easy access to a virtually unlimited amount of high-end rendering machines ready to speed up your work and make your deadlines easier for a very reasonable price.

For the moment, we only use the CPU engine and currently, and we can guarantee the use of machines with these minimum specifications: Intel Xeon (Skylake) machines with 96 cores, with a base frequency of 2.0 GHz, full core turbo of 2.7 GHz and a maximum turbo on a single core of 3.5 GHz with 86.4GB of RAM.

This processor renders the benchwell CPU scene (SL15 and 1280x720 pixels) in 6m10s plus 1m28s needed to wake the machine up and load the scene, so it makes a total of 7m38s. The benchmark is 2176.44.

Open

In all our products you’ll find a new button to send your Maxwell scene to the cloud. The process is very similar to sending it to the Network System, but you don’t need to deal with the Manager, the Nodes, paths or any network configuration problems. Easy!

Here is a couple of videos showing the Maxwell Cloud workflow and what be done with it:

Workflow

Maxwell Cloud is handled through the Maxwell Monitor app in a very similar way to a traditional network render but easier as the Network Manager and the Render Nodes are not involved. You can send your jobs from the Monitor, but usually, the easiest way is just doing it from Studio or the plugin you are using.

All the information related to the Cloud is available under the CLOUD tab; on the other hand, everything related to your local network (the traditional Network Render) will be available under the LOCAL tab.

Toolbar

In the Cloud section, you’ll find this toolbar to manage your cloud jobs:

This section is related to your user account:

Adding a job

Once you have set your scene as you want, you can use the Add cloud job button or if you are working from the plugin you only have to click the button to send the scene to the cloud. In the former case, you will get a dialogue to selected the desired files to render and then you’ll be taken to the dialogues below; in the latter case, Maxwell Monitor will open and show you these dialogues:

In Step #1 you can modify some general options of the render like the Time limit, SL, channels,….

Also, with the option Save the output files only at the end, you can save some rendering time (basically, the intermediate saving time of the different updates as well as the transfer of the rendered image to the server), with the drawback of not being able to preview or download the render until it has finished or you stop it. The time saved can be significant when you are rendering very big images.

Logging in

Before sending the job to the cloud you have to connect to your account. This will be the same customer account you use at the Next Limit Portal.

All the jobs sent to the Cloud will be accessible from any location once you login to the Monitor, so you could send a job from your office and download the render from your home and then from your office again.

The jobs will be kept in your account and will be available for downloading until you delete them.

You can also login using the button from the toolbar:

Jobs list

Once you click on the Finish button, the scene or scenes will be packed along with all the textures and dependencies into a zip file and sent to a cloud.

One machine will be woken up per mxs file, so in the case of rendering animations, all the frames will be rendered more or less at the same time.

The time required to wake up a machine, load Maxwell and the scene may take around 1:30 to 2 minutes (this will be charged too) and after that, the time required to get the preview available may vary between 1 minute or 50 minutes depending on the size of the image, the number of channels and if Multilight is on or not. You will see an icon next to the render status to inform you the preview is available.

The job information

There are different columns with a lot of information related to the renders that are in process or finished:

• Name: it’s the name of the job; it can contain several renders if you selected several MXS files when adding the job.

• ID: unique code that helps to identify your render and job in particular on the Cloud machines; send these to the support team in case you have a problem with them (you can use the bug and envelope icon to easily copy them).

• Scene: that’s the name of the MXS file that is being rendered on that Cloud machine.

• Owner: that’s the user that launched the render; if your account has several users, it helps to identify who launched it.

• Status: it shows the status of the render; it can vary between Starting, Running, Finished,…

• Blank column (preview): here you will see an image icon when the rendering machine has saved render information to the Cloud server; when you see this icon, it means there’s already an image stored (although it may not be the final image); at this moment, you can download the images, if you wish, to start working in an image editor, for example.

• Time Consumed: this counter shows the Cloud time consumed by that render in particular (it also counts the time required to wake the machine up, load Maxwell and start the render, which can be around 1 minute or 1minute and a half).

• Time Left: this column shows the time estimated for the render to be finished; the estimation is based on the Time Limit and the Target SL (Sampling Level) set in the scene and the performance of the scene. If it shows -:-:- it may mean the render has not started yet or it has already finished (check the Status column to learn what’s happening with the render).

• Time Limit: this is the Time Limit set in the scene; the render will stop automatically if it gets to that rendering time unless it reaches the Target SL first.

• Current SL: it shows the SL reached by the render at that particular moment; if the render has finished because it has reached the Target SL these two columns will show the same number.

• Target SL: it shows the SL limit set in the scene; the render will stop automatically when it reaches this SL unless the Time Limit is reached first.

• Creation date: it shows the date and time the render was uploaded to be rendered in the Cloud in this format: year/month/day hour:minute

• Deletion date: the jobs will be stored on the server for 1 month and then they’ll be deleted. The estimated deletion date should show up here, although it is not working at the moment.

• Info: this space is usually reserved for showing error messages in a particular job or render.

Downloading the renders

Once the renders are finished (or you decide to stop them) you can click the download button from the toolbar. You’ll be taken to a dialogue to choose where you want to save your files.

Maxwell will create a folder in the chosen location with a name made from the job name or render name and its unique ID and it will include the .mxi file, render and channels of each rendered .mxs plus a log file.

If you choose to download the whole job (which can include several renders), you will get one folder tagged as [Job] with all the files inside; on the other hand, you can choose to download only one of the renders of a job; in that case, you will get a folder tagged as [Render] with only the files of that particular render.

In the Preferences, you can choose the default location of the download folder.

Conditions of the service

These are the conditions related to the time consumed and charged:

• The Cloud time can be bought in packs of 10 hours.

• The consumed time is deducted per second.

• The time is consumed per machine so, for instance, if you have bought 5 hours of cloud time, you would be able to render one scene for 5 hours or 5 scenes for 1 hour.

• The time required to wake up a machine, load Maxwell and start the render will also subtract from the cloud time (normally, it can take around 2 minutes to start rendering).

• Once the render has finished or is stopped or canceled, it will stop subtracting time from your account.

• You can keep your finished or stopped jobs in the jobs list for free. You won’t be charged for that. However, we suggest downloading the result of the render jobs right after finishing the render. The jobs will be available to the user for 30 days and then, the render information will be deleted. The job UI data (time, SL, etc.) will be kept as a log until the user decides to delete it.

• The Cloud time bought may have an expiration date (usually, a year after the last time you bought some Cloud time).

• On our webshop, you can buy as many Cloud hours as needed and the expiration date will be updated.

• There is an eight-hour limit to each render in Cloud. If you need more time for a particular render, you can render the same render twice or more times and merge the MXI files in Maxwell Render afterward.

• As a provider of the Maxwell | Cloud Service, Next Limit SL. commits to ensuring the confidentiality of customer data stored on the cloud. This can only be disclosed upon customer request and with the customer's knowledge. In addition, Next Limit SL. does not take any responsibility for the nature of content generated and stored in Maxwell | Cloud by the customer, as this is produced exclusively from the data provided by the customer and the render engine.

Having trouble with a job?

Version History

Here you can see the updates done to the Maxwell version that is loaded on the cloud machines related to the cloud service: Maxwell Cloud - Version History