Hi HN,
My name is David Sokol, and I'm the founder of rentaflop (https://rentaflop.com). We're a crowdsourced render farm aimed at making Blender rendering fast and affordable.
If you've used Blender, then I'm sure you've experienced the pain of waiting around for your animations to render. You've probably even had to sacrifice the quality of your work to reduce your render times. I've been there too.
If you're like me, then you're also disappointed with the alternative solutions: spending thousands of dollars on graphics cards or using prohibitively expensive cloud render farms to get fast render times. Our solution to this dilemma is to leverage low opportunity cost hardware from around the world to allow Blender artists to render their projects quickly, affordably, and without compromising on quality. Since most graphics card owners aren't utilizing their hardware to do valuable work 24/7, we provide them with a way to make money without lifting a finger, while lowering the cost curve for 3D rendering.
We're currently doing a private beta. If you'd like to get early access, check out our site (https://rentaflop.com) and join the waitlist. If you're a graphics card owner who wants to help Blender artists while earning money, reach out to support@rentaflop.com and we'll help you get set up.
Please leave a comment below, we'd love to hear your thoughts :)
The energy we put into animations is real. Going from 150 samples to 200 will maybe reduce the noise in a tiny portion of the image a little bit, but the energy and time used for it is real. After a certain threshold every kWh you spend is spent on very subtle improvements.
With my students I can typically reduce render times by factor 10 just by selecting the right settings and using details where it matters instead of everywhere. A render that would take two weeks on their machine would then be done in 36 hours.
Independent of the resources you use (e.g. a crowdsourced renderfarm) these optimizations should be done.