Pipeline to transfer big sims to client?

[caskal]

Hey magicians,

I'm working on a project with a client that involves some large simulations, around 400gb stuff, my internet connection isn't the best on my city (10mb down, 5mb up), so I wanted to ask what's the best pipeline in this cases.

The client gave me the idea to save the sim in a hard drive, and send to them over fedex or something, so they got all the stuff within some days and they can render there. Another solution I think can work is using some service like Gridmarkets where I gave them the files and they render out.

Any ideas will be more than welcome

Thank you!

[LaidlawFX]

Shipping a hard drive is very traditional. DHL overnight shipping could be a more straightforward approach, time efficient, and probably cheaper approach(Hard Drive + DHL to which you can clearly line item the bill to the client). Plus you can include all the assets and files. Very 90s and 00s approach to handling data.

Just remember if you are going to render online; you need to upload all the data, process it, and make sure it is received by the client correctly i.e. no processing errors. This can be time consuming and depending on how much you bill yourself costly, plus you need to be aware of how much the client is going to be flexible if the processing gets messed up. It cost a lot more money if you screw up rendering on a cloud, than at home. Grid Market is a good business, just need to pay attention to the economics of the situation. 

I take it remoting into their farm so you can monitor a new render on their machines is out of the question? If you are going to send files to an online cloud you could just go directly to their farm.

 

 

[caskal]

Thanks for the info! @LaidlawFX I didn't know about the hard drive shipping approach.

Great tips on handling the scenes with online farms, appreciate them. For now, what I ended doing is giving my client (they have a render farm) a organized houdini file with relative path, and explained them how to cook there. Crossing fingers so it all works, first big job with houdini simulations.

Thank you!