Cinema 4D Render Farm

Cinema 4D from MAXON is a popular application for creating 3D effects and scenes. It is easy to learn, offers tools for a wide range of tasks, and can be adjusted for any workflow. It is highly regarded in the motion graphics industry thanks to its focus on creating a perfect environment to render 3D videos without the need for additional software. To make the process faster, it is advisable to use a Cinema 4D render farm.

The main difference between rendering on a personal computer and on a render farm is the output file format. Cinema 4D offers an option to render 3D projects directly into video files. This is useful for a fast workflow in short animations, especially when rendering each frame takes seconds. However, on a render farm, each scene may be rendered on several computers at the same time, and the data has to be shared via the local network. This way, if something happens to one of the nodes, you lose a frame and have to restart the whole rendering process from the beginning, even if it occurs in the last portion of the animation.

That’s why it is recommended to save output files as static images, one per frame; if one frame gets skipped, it will be re-rendered by a different node. This method makes it easier to fix mistakes or change parts of animation: you won’t have to redo the whole video but only select frames or segments. Re-rendering a full video takes longer, and on a Cinema 4D render farm, it means spending more money. Finally, render elements are also saved separately as images and can be used in compositing. The frames can then be combined into a video file using specialized video editing software.

As mentioned above, the main advantage of a Cinema 4D render farm is the ability to render one project using several powerful computers. Rendering nodes are grouped together into pools, and one of them acts as a supervisor: it sends the tasks to others and then receives results. When rendering animation, every node works on a single frame, and several frames render simultaneously. Rendering of a single image can also be distributed between computers. In bucket mode (e.g., in V-Ray), each node would work on a single bucket; in progressive mode (e.g., in Corona), the distribution nodes calculate passes separately, and the pool leader combines data into an image.

Megarender is a CPU render farm, and it offers support for three major Cinema 4D rendering engines: Arnold from Autodesk, V-Ray and Corona from Chaos. CPU-based rendering offers photorealistic results and supports a wide variety of complicated physical effects. It also allows the use of large volumes of RAM, while GPUs are limited by their unscalable VRAM. The only drawback is increased rendering time on general computers. However, Megarender utilizes the power of AMD Threadripper 3990X CPUs with 256 GB RAM each; these are some of the most powerful processors on the modern market, guaranteeing the fastest rendering.

You can render Cinema 4D projects at the Megarender cloud render farm through our chat. Instead of automation, as is available for 3DS MAX projects, we offer personal supervision and a preliminary time-cost calculation. First, collect the whole scene using File Menu -> Save Project with Assets. Make sure you collect the take you need. This will create a new folder on your computer that contains all the files needed to render the project correctly. Archive this folder and upload this file to our File Manager. For big projects, you can upload the file from your Google Drive via a link; this option is available after clicking the ‘Add scene’ button in the Project Manager. When you upload the file in this way, do not go to the ‘Check scene’ screen, as it only imports 3DS MAX files. Instead, check the File Manager to see if your archive has successfully uploaded into the root folder. 

After that, contact a specialist in the support chat. They manually upload the scene to our computers and run tests to determine how long it would take for the full project to render. Once the project cost and time are approved and a prepayment is made, the final rendering begins. Results get uploaded to the File Manager to be downloaded via an FTP-client or to a Google Drive folder.

If you have more questions about how to work with our Cinema 4D render farm, contact us in the chat. We are available 24/7 for any time zone.