Using Amazon Web Services for faster renderings.

We have been experimenting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for off-site, cloud renderings.

AWS can be used to create rendering 3 to 8 times faster than on your own machine, (depending - of course - on the speed of your own machine). A rendering which would take 2 days on your own machine can be completed in 12 hours or less on an AWS Virtual machine for a cost less $45.00.

We hope to add functionality to make this easier to do in future versions of IRender nXt and nXtRender, but with a little effort you can do it right now. Once you set up your virtual machine, you can save it, restart it, and easily connect to it for future rendering.

You can also create multiple machines to process simultaneous renderings or different models or views.

This process is a little daunting the first time, but is much easier when you return to your AWS machine for future renderings. Basically you create a AWS Virtual Machine, remote log into it, install SketchUp and IRender nXt, and use it to render your model.

We have a Wiki article to get you started: Setting up AWS. This is a work in progress - so let us know what problems you run into or how we can improve the documentation for this.

Typical Rendering speeds.

(The top three are machines in our office. The bottom two are the fastest AWS machines)