Frequently asked questions

SkyPoints are the credits you spend on rendering at Sky Render Farm. One SkyPoint costs $1. We measure rendering power in GHz hours (CPU) or OB hours (GPU) and debit the matching number of SkyPoints from your balance. You buy SkyPoints before starting a render job, from the account page.

A GHz hour is one CPU core running at 1 GHz for one hour. Sky Render Farm bills rendering in GHz hours for CPU work and OB hours for GPU work, which makes the cost of a job predictable rather than tied to which machine happened to pick it up.

Sky Render Farm supports Blender, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine, with render engines including Cycles, EEVEE, V-Ray, Corona, Arnold, Redshift and Unreal's Movie Render Queue and Path Tracer. See the Supported Software page for the current matrix. SkyRender Desktop checks your scene before submission and reports any plugin the farm cannot load, so you find out before spending credits.

SkyRender Desktop is the free companion app for Windows, macOS and Linux. It installs the Sky Sender plugins into your 3D applications, uploads your scenes, submits jobs to the farm, and downloads finished frames automatically. It is the bridge between your workstation and the render farm.

SkyRender Desktop runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, alongside any 3D application the farm supports. The Windows build is distributed through the Microsoft Store; the macOS disk images (Apple Silicon and Intel) and the Linux AppImage are on the download page, which lists the current requirements for each platform.

Sky Render Farm runs two services. Blender and Unreal Engine are node rental: you choose the graphics cards, rent as many as the deadline needs, and pay for the seconds they run at the node's hourly rate. Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D are cloud render: the farm assigns the machines and you pay for the CPU and GPU hours your job uses. Both are paid for in SkyPoints from the same balance, and both are submitted the same way, from SkyRender Desktop. What differs is whether you pick the hardware and what the meter counts, which is why the cost estimate is worked out differently for each.

After installing SkyRender Desktop, the Sky Sender plugin appears in the main menu and toolbars of your 3D application. It is available for Blender, Unreal Engine, Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.

The exact cost depends on your scene, because displacement, scene size, particles, fur and lighting all change render time. Job cost updates live while rendering, so you can watch it as it runs. For an estimate before submitting, use the cost calculator (skyrenderfarm.com/calculator) with your local render time per frame. Send two or three test frames first to confirm the real time and cost before committing a full sequence.

Install SkyRender Desktop and sign in with your Sky Render Farm account. Submit from your 3D application using the Sky Sender plugin, and SkyRender Desktop uploads the scene and its assets automatically.

SkyRender Desktop downloads each finished frame to a folder you choose, as the job renders. You can also re-download previous outputs from the app.

Completed frames download automatically to your chosen local folder while the job runs. Keep SkyRender Desktop open during rendering so frames arrive as soon as they finish.

Yes. New accounts get a free trial credit for a test render. It is added the first time you sign in to SkyRender Desktop, not when you register on the website, and each computer receives it once. Once it is used, you buy SkyPoints to keep rendering.

No. Sky Render Farm is entirely pay as you go. There is no subscription, no monthly charge and no minimum commitment — you pay only for the rendering you actually use.

No. The hourly figure on a node is a rate, not a unit of sale. A rented node meters by the second, from the moment it starts until your job releases it, so a seven-minute render on a $0.648/hour node costs about eight cents. There is no minimum rental, no rounding up to the next hour, and nothing to remember to switch off afterwards. Hourly is simply the figure that lets you compare two cards at a glance.

Almost never. An animation is a fixed amount of work — 200 frames is 200 frames whichever machines render them — and because nodes bill by the second you are paying for that work, not for how widely it is spread. Renting two nodes and renting fifteen come to roughly the same total; what changes is that the two-node run takes most of a night and the fifteen-node run takes about an hour. A node that runs out of frames is released, so nodes left without work in the last round are not billed. The one thing that does add a little is start-up: each node can take about a minute to start and load your scene before its first frame, so fifteen nodes spend about thirteen more node-minutes getting ready than two. More nodes buy time, not a discount and not a penalty.

You are charged exactly the amount you top up, and larger top-ups earn bonus credits on top. Bonuses start at 2% from $250 and reach 10% at $50,000. For example, paying $250 credits 255 SkyPoints. This is a bonus on credits received, not a discount on the price paid.