A Practical Example: Traditional Render Farm vs. Render Network
Imagine a freelance 3D artist working on a tight timeline to deliver five motion graphics sequences for a commercial campaign. The clips range from 30 to 90 seconds each, with heavy volumetrics, particle systems, and layered post effects. Using their high-end personal workstation with a single RTX 3090, the artist estimates it would take nearly 20 hours to render everything locally – eating into valuable time needed for client revisions, color passes, and final delivery.
They consider a traditional cloud render farm. While it promises faster renders, the process involves exporting each scene, zipping up project files with dependencies, uploading via FTP, configuring settings through a third-party dashboard, and hoping their plugins are fully supported. Render times are faster – around 2 hours – but the cost comes in at several hundred dollars. Worse, they run into compatibility issues with a specific volumetric plugin and lose time troubleshooting.
By contrast, with the Render Network, the artist launches the Render C4D Wizard directly from within their Cinema4D + Octane setup. Their scene is validated locally, assets are packed and uploaded, and within minutes, they’re rendering across the network. Thanks to the availability of a large network of nodes on the Render Network, the render job can be distributed to nodes with compatible GPUs and render engine configurations to run concurrently. The artist gets full visibility and full control of render jobs from the moment they upload to the moment they’re ready to download. They monitor progress in real-time: they can see the frames and even review playback video through the rendering process. They can make a few tweaks based on test frames, and finish rendering all five sequences in minutes, at a fraction of the cost of the commercial farm.
Not only did they save time on rendering, but familiar worktool flows gave them more hours for polish and client feedback. They deliver early, impress the client, and keep their margin intact.
Of course, the speed and cost will vary project to project depending on factors such as scene complexity, file size, and network usage at any one time.
Behind the scenes, Render Network is supported by OTOY, the team behind OctaneRender, and has strong ties to Maxon, creators of Cinema4D. This level of institutional support offers artists and studios long-term confidence that the Render Network isn’t a fleeting trend, but a core part of the industry’s infrastructure. It also means robust 24/7 customer support, which can be critical during late-night deadline sprints or high-stakes commercial deliveries.
