Thursday, June 28th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Meet Felix: Maxwell Render rendering in the cloud

Online rendering services are fairly common these days. So when the video above appeared on YouTube, we weren’t initially going to cover it. But what caught our attention was the fact that Felix, the cloud rendering system in question, is based on a desktop client – and that the rendering is based around Maxwell Render.

Once the client is installed – which can be done for free on an unlimited number of machines – users pay for credits to process rendering jobs online. You don’t need Maxwell Render itself installed.

The hard facts
The service itself is run by Italian visualisation firm Stack! Studios, and has been around a while: this introductory video explaining the workflow dates back to 2010.

Prices range from €0.14 (around $0.17) for a 600×300-pixel test, to €14 ($17) for 3,000×1,500-pixel render.

Discounts are available for animation jobs. The Felix website also includes a table showing the resulting savings – fairly speculative, we thought – in electricity and hardware costs.

The speed boosts are fairly impressive, if not absolutely gigantic: renders complete about three times faster than on a 24-core workstation, according to this webpage.

But you can process up to four render jobs at once, and it runs on a low-spec laptop.

If you do a lot of physically based rendering, particularly if you work on the move, that might make it worth a look.

Visit the Felix homepage

Download the Felix client (Windows only)